Critics Of "13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi"
Peter Travers
Rolling Stone
January 16, 2016
Several critics have given 13 Hours a pass, citing Bay's skill at action engineering. It's his failure at everything else that makes this movie as hard to endure as it is impossible to believe. #helpme
The movie is imperfect and overlong but it's never boring. And, although aspects of its factual accuracy can be called into question, it does a decent job of chronicling what happened that night.
Bay's action sequences are as riveting and technically beautiful as ever, but his reductive worldview is also on display. "13 Hours" doesn't just lionize its American soldiers, it oozes disdain for everyone else.
[Bay] does well here what he always does well: He keeps the action at full throttle. This is also what he does so annoyingly: He always keeps things at full throttle.
[Bay] is hell on manly banter amid the explosions ("Just another Tuesday night in Benghazi"), and also moments carefully calculated to make you feel the horrors - and the heroics - of war. Emphasis on "calculated."
The loss of life is movingly depicted but these largely unfeasible, weirdly unreal characters are much too cocky and swaggery, when not being disdainful and patronising towards the locals. So don't bother.
13 Hours remains very much a combat movie made by the man who once hustled Armageddon onto our screens, no more nourishing, affecting or heavyweight than the popcorn ground into the multiplex carpet.
The final word on this incident will require a more thoughtful filmmaker. But hopefully, that artist will possess at least half of Bay's punishing, peerless craft.