13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2024)

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

Michael Bay’s “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi” is another example of his Pearl Harbor; it is just another one of those slick, soulless excesses that cannot be stylistically or dramatically differentiated from the rest of his filmography.

The film starts with Jack Silva (John Krasinski), a former navy seal who comes to work in Benghazi as an independent contractor for a security detail at the CIA compound together with old friend, Tyrone “Rone” Woods (James Badge Dale), based on Mitchell Zuckoff’s best-selling book which was written with five survivors’ contributions. This job sucks Benghazi is one of the most dangerous places on this earth; he is far away from his spouse and daughters; and all the official CIA people he works under especially outpost chief Bob (David Costabile) always remind him how important they are compared to the security guys. It pays more than being a realtor at home.

Matt Letscher portrays U.S Ambassador Chris Stevens, who arrives at Benghazi in early September 2012 and insists on staying at the diplomatic facility during his visit. Before ambassador Steven’s arrival, Silva, Rone and their fellow security consultants go through their premises once only to find out that it does not provide enough protection for them. When Rone finds out about this meeting that has been exposed to every person in this highly volatile region, he can’t believe it but nevertheless warns everyone about its implications. Nonetheless, there is nothing alarming about this situation according to the CIA men and the security patrol around grinds of protests by their warnings.

On September 11th after having set ablaze the compound where Stevens was inside armed rioting mob storms into it in an effort to smoke him out. From their vantage point at a CIA outpost located perhaps a mile away, among other six vigilant guards including Kris “Tanto” Paronto (Pablo Schreiber), Dave “Boon” Benton (David Denman), John “Tig” Tiegan (Dominic Fumusa), Mark “Oz” Geist (Max Martini), can observe the events as they unfold and are ready to run there if necessary, that is unless demand is made by the main CIA agent.

This order continues until they disobey him and go to the compound although without any permission. And while they fight off various waves of attackers and manage to pull out a couple of people, in the burning building they don’t locate Stevens before heading back to their base. It is at this point that the CIA base comes under fire next with these guys and some others having no alternative but singlehandedly defending it along with those inside when air support calls go unanswered, and a proposed rescue team remains grounded in Tripoli due to bureaucratic red tape.

In the hands of a skilled director, Benghazi could have given us another Black Hawk Down by Ridley Scott, an absolute tragedy about operation gone wrong in an unstable nation. It showed what occurred, the heroism displayed during that period and how it was mixed with mistakes, poor decisions and just plain bad luck.

Unfortunately, Michael Bay is not such a filmmaker; instead he tells the story in the most general way possible. The script written by Chuck Hogan is as simplistic and simple-minded as can be with our six heroes being near gods while government operatives are stupid caricatures who are crude in their thinking. To show why they risk themselves for others’ safety he has one of them quote from “The Power of Myth” by Joseph Campbell but also repeats it as if it were a flashback at the end this is also where anything like character development pretty much stops too.

Frankly speaking, the best piece of writing I saw here was a scene from “Tropic Thunder” that is shown because considering what that movie is a bunch of actors going off to film a war story that turns out to have been not quite as authentic as advertised it seems either like the sickest joke ever or some kind of weird meta-commentary slipped into its middle.

However, this remains the same with everything else for Bay an extremely violent video game which has all flashiness but nothing more than this. Going back to “Black Hawk Down”, you would remember how effectively Scott portrayed the chaotic nature of events while still maintaining order within them so that it was possible for viewers to follow through.

However, “13 Hours” does not seem like such fogged war scenario anyway; more likely it appears to be clouded view on film grammar essentialities through which a filmmaker tries to tell his story. One might say Bay aims at presenting things from inside out meaning an immersion into chaos and mystery just as confused characters were supposed to feel but he isn’t competent enough to succeed in this. Employing his usual tricks of quick cuts, slow-motion and flashy special effects (such as a shot following a mortar bomb as it falls from the sky to strike its target which seems to be Bay’s echo of a same scene in his own “Pearl Harbor”), he does everything possible for an immediate reaction (e.g. even one long shot with machine gunned American flag in slow motion) but fails to provide viewers with any other knowledge that could explain anything about what happened.

The action is terrible enough but the sections supposed to be character based are even worse like the scene when Silva gets some news from his wife and kids via video chat while they all stand at a McDonald’s drive thru window which is so poorly executed that it makes the one in Bay’s “Armageddon” with Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler and some animal crackers look relatively subtle.

To put it simply, “13 Hours” is a lousy movie that had me guessing about its target audience. The liberals will not pay attention to this film because it has elements that have been much debated or simply disclaimed (by various people) presented as matters of fact. Conservatives might be annoyed at how the film fails to explicitly link Hillary Clinton with those events unless I missed something, she is never mentioned once by name in it. It is a noisy and perilously fake action movie and historical document which takes scant interest in the fate of the men who performed heroic deeds. However, “13 Hours” is not that movie; there could be a good movie about Benghazi but this isn’t it.

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