13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016)

After catching up on most of the Oscar flicks from the past year that I’d rather not have waited until DVD to see, 2016 begins with a military film. I’m not sure why – the records don’t bear it out – but it feels like this is exactly the sort of film with which I always begin my year, being a competently told but largely indistinguishable war film with a strongly personal focus bordering on hagiography. The real surprise, however, is that Michael Bay directed this one (about which, so much more later).

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi tells the true (and largely apolitical) story of a team of CIA military contractors (including among them John Krasinski and James Badge Dale) who defied the orders of their Chief (David Costabile) to mount an aid-and-rescue mission to the besieged American embassy in Benghazi in September 2012.

First of all, as an action film 13 Hours is a big success. My primary goal as a moviegoer (a kind of Declaration of Principles at the top of the year, for those just tuning in) is to escape – escape from today and into a narrative, preferably with some degree of spectacle. This isn’t to say that I require spectacle – Spotlight is definitely on my hypothetical Best-Of list for last year – but the project of escapism helps if something blows up. And boy, do things blow up in 13 Hours. The action sequences here don’t so much allow you to escape reality as grab you by your lapels and thrust you into an intense combat situation. Pair with that the film’s sense of unrelenting tension, the anxious attitude that the worst is just about to materialize, and you have a film that is very difficult to stop watching. I don’t imagine, for the home video crowd, that there are many good spots to get a refill or take a bathroom break.

To say that 13 Hours is compelling stuff is not, however, to say that it’s a new classic. There’s nothing particularly innovative in it, nothing really memorable beyond the memory of being engaged in the moment. It doesn’t demand a second viewing, doesn’t invite a critical rethinking of one’s premises. It is, in the most earnest sense of the phrase, a popcorn film, albeit one which is not lazily made. It is actually quite well-made, cogently directed but with little on either end of the lazy/ambitious spectrum.

This, then, is the film’s greatest surprise – that 13 Hours was directed by Michael Bay. It’s remarkable to realize that 13 Hours contains very little of the excess that made such a mess of the Transformers franchise. There is little inappropriate comic relief; one recognizes, though, that the translator Amahl (Peyman Moaadi) is the kind of character that would be played by John Turturro, dialed up to eleven, and/or be the focal point of a thousand gross stereotypes if this were a Transformers movie. More agreeably, 13 Hours contains none of the leery sexuality of Transformers, by which I mean there are no young women in skimpy clothing bending over cars. 13 Hours is, however, as hypermasculine and rah-rah patriotic, though it’s presented less in the form of an advertisement and more built into the narrative itself. That is, the entire movie is “the army saves the day” rather than relegate that moment to merely a montage set to the music of AC/DC. It is, dare I say it, a more restrained and perhaps even mature Michael Bay film (which is, admittedly, a short putt).

It’s evident that Bay has a tremendous respect for the Armed Forces, though it borders on canonization in a few moments. We’ve seen a turn in war films toward an emphasis on individual heroism and away from sweeping historical narratives; there’s little of overt political content in the film, though a few beats of narrative readily politicized by pundits and politicians alike. Bay is more interested in the human element than the currents of history, though the scriptwriting is so on-the-nose that a repeated quotation from Joseph Campbell – explicitly mythologizing the “secret soldiers” and deifying them with the subtlety of a Mack truck – falls flat because of both how out-of-place it feels and how carelessly overt it is. While the direction of the film is more discreet than Bay has delivered of late, the hagiography isn’t. (One could imagine a cut of the film which eliminates the Campbell altogether, allowing the audience to intuit Bay’s point, and I’d have to say I’d have preferred this version. Show, don’t tell.)

Not an instant classic, not a groundbreaker, nor the political bombshell the 2016 candidates might have wanted, 13 Hours is competent enough and compelling enough that it makes for a fine diversion at the start of the year. It bodes well enough for Bay’s maturity as a filmmaker as, at the very least, a step in the right direction, but then again Transformers 5 is due next year. So much for that idea.

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is rated R for “strong combat violence throughout, bloody images, and language.” The film is intensely violent, often graphically so, but comprised more of explosions and gunfire punctuated by moments of gore. There are a fair amount of F-words, though the context makes them seem less distasteful.