Ed's Review Dot Com

Columbia Pictures, Annapurna Pictures, First Light Production,

Jessica Chastain, Jason Clarke, Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Ehle, Mark Strong, Kyle Chandler, Édgar Ramírez , James Gandolfini, Chris Pratt, Reda Kateb, Scott Adkins, Taylor Kinney

Maya (Jessica Chastain) is a CIA operative being trained in the harsh interrogation procedures handled by the CIA on the Al Quaida terrorists. But when she gets a lead on the possible location of Osama bin Laden. After convincing the CIA leaders to go after him, the story tells of the Navy Seals and the events of the day bin Laden was killed.

A lot of people really were blown away by this movie. I was not, and I’m not really sure why. Argo was a much better movie than this was, although Argo wasn’t nearly my choice as the best picture either. I’ve been really struggling with why I didn’t like this story. I guess there are really a couple of reasons. For one, this is a recent event, and it was covered thoroughly by the media, and debated heavily at the time. So the details are really fresh, and there really wasn’t much new here. The story plodded. It wasn’t really very exciting. We’ve seen much better computer animation on the History Channel, and A&E, as well as on the network news. Jessica Chastain’s Maya wasn’t a nice character. She kind of bugged me through the whole movie. She was playing a strong woman who knew she was right, but throughout she was a bit of nagging wench. Furthermore, when the moment of truth came around, it was shot in a Blair Witch kind of shaky, dark camera way, that it was hard to follow what was going on. All in all, it wasn’t terrible, but it wasn’t that great either. I expected a great story told in a grand way, and I got more of a History Channel TV documentary. I was underwhelmed. I waited for it to get really interesting, but there wasn’t anything more to tell, I guess, than what we already knew. This was not the blockbuster film I expected. I think most people fell patriotic about the subject, and so the movie got a lot more attention due to the events that happened than by the actual movie. So if you’re interested, give it a go, but if you’re looking for something to blow your mind, I don’t think it will.

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