My cynical take on “Patriots Day” (2016) is movie producer Mark Wahlberg gave movie director Peter Berg money to do what Peter Berg does best, which is to make movie star Mark Wahlberg look like some kind of everyman hero. However, Berg is such a masterful storyteller he makes Wahlberg practically superfluous despite making him ridiculously ubiquitous. Seriously. You could have cut much of Wahlberg’s screen time, reduced the film by 20 minutes and ended up with an indy-style Boston Marathon bombing film instead of an emotionally exploitative, big-budget cliche. Sorry if that makes me a bad American, but it’s true.
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The one thing I’ve noticed about the last couple of Peter Berg movies is that Mark Wahlberg gets his ass whupped. First “Lone Survivor” and now “Deepwater Horizon” (2016), a retelling of the 2010 BP oil exploration disaster. (Good thing Berg isn’t doing the “Ted” series, otherwise the bear probably would have killed Marky Mark by now.) This one reminded me a little of 1970s disaster flicks (“The Towering Inferno,” “Earthquake”) where chaos is the star and we’re just trying to survive along with all the actors until the end. Things were a lot less gory 40 years ago, though.
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