Act of Valor (**)

The big deal about this film is that real Navy SEALs took part in the filming. The bad deal (besides the storyline) is that they aren’t great actors, and, unlike having a real mixed-martial-arts star in Haywire, their presence probably doesn’t add much to the action scenes either. You can see Gina Carano’s fighting skill on display in the former, but a sniper’s shooting skills and quick response time could be more easily faked. Still, there seems to be some realism to the first action sequence, in which a team of SEALs take down kidnappers in the Philippines. A couple of later set pieces, while upping the action quotient, bring diminishing returns in terms of dramatic tension.

Directors Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh had previously made a documentary short, but this is the first feature for both. Waugh was a former stunt coordinator, so it makes sense that the action is good in terms of technical quality, though only average in terms of how they’re filmed. Where the movie is weak, though, is in supplying an interesting storyline or characters. I forgot the credentials of each of the SEALS even as they were recited (in a voiceover), save for the “chief,” who is said to be a fearsome interrogator. Aside from the chief, there’s very little to differentiate the heroes, though one of them, shown leaving a wife at home and heard quoting Tecumseh (“A single twig breaks, but the bundle of twigs is strong”), is sort of a main character.

The bad guys are more interesting (and more convincingly portrayed) and have a novel new weapon at their disposal. One of them, at least, is given a little more dimension than your typical action-movie villain. When interrogated, he even appears to care for his wife and children. Given the movie’s reverence for the military, it’s not surprising that, when we get to see the chief in action, there’s no waterboarding, but actual interrogation. This is a welcome novelty, but the questioning is so brief that it’s not a whole lot more realistic than movies in which beatings produce uniformly reliable confessions.

As for the plotting, it basically comes down to the team being told of some bit of intelligence, then progressing to somewhere else on the globe, now the Philippines, now Africa, now Mexico. How the intelligence is actually gathered is not of concern; basically the goal is to provide an excuse for the SEALs to go somewhere else and kick some ass. Those who like their action with a patriotic patina may find Act of Valor stirring, and the screen crawl at the end listing SEALs who have actually died in combat is sobering, but this is still a pretty mediocre movie at best.

IMDb link

viewed 2/8/12 at Ritz East [PFS screening] and reviewed 2/9/12 and 2/27/12