Posts tagged Brian Call

“Interesting and Exhausting”

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

LONE SURVIVOR is based on the true story of a military operation in 2005 in Afghanistan that went terribly wrong.

Mark Wahlberg stars as Chief Petty Officer Marcus Luttrell, a member of Navy SEAL Team 10, which took part in the operation after which Luttrell wrote a best-selling book about his experience.

The film and the story also have a Colorado connection, as one member of the SEAL team on the ground, Danny Dietz, played by Emile Hirsch, grew up in the Denver area.

The team was charged with capturing or killing a top Taliban leader named Ahmad Shah, who was known to be responsible for the deaths of many Americans in the military.

So, a team of four men are dropped on the ground in Afghanistan, and we hear the radio signal from the command plane above them say, “We’ll be with you for the next six hours; have a nice walk.”

Unfortunately, events begin to go wrong almost immediately when they get into position and an old man and two boys herding some goats stumble upon their location.

The team captures the goatherders, but their rules of engagement prevent them from harming unarmed prisoners, and when the team can’t communicate with their commanding officer back at base camp about what to do, after some disagreement among themselves, they let the three prisoners go unharmed, and now that the operation is compromised, they head for higher ground.

Then an army of Taliban soldiers finds them and engages them in a firefight that essentially is the rest of the movie.

There is an attempt to break up the nonstop bloody action with a couple of side stories about an Arabian horse wanted as a wedding present and the harassment of a new member back at base camp, but essentially the movie consists of the combat fighting between the team and the Taliban as the team is cut down to its title character.

How he survives after the fighting is over on the mountain is of interest and points out a culture clash, but at this point the audience is probably exhausted from everything that leads up to it.

As a story, the movie is interesting, but as a movie, it is exhausting.

LONE SURVIVOR leaves it up to the audience to decide whether to be interested or exhausted.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”