Post by Ladyfingers on May 31, 2020 15:03:45 GMT
I felt like watching a simple action flick and this is one of those. It's competent but not brilliant, although the visuals are very nice indeed and it has some decent combat. You can lob all the post-modern criticism you like at it, but this is just a very basic soldier hero story that happens to be set in Africa. As it happens, the fictional conflict depicted isn't far off what's actually happening in Nigeria right now, so cry me a river about tone-deaf, unflattering depictions. I suppose this was part of the military propaganda push Hollywood was making in the lead-up to the Iraq invasion. Certainly a lot of actual military assistance was given to the makers.
Fuqua seems to make morally uncomplicated films where his protagonists brutally right wrongs he's presumably incensed about, so this is just your standard Fuqua, minus the hilariousness of Olympus Has Fallen or the genuine merit of Training Day. I think Fuqua takes some personal gratification with the grisly revenge his protagonists exact in his films, and as far as dumb action satisfaction goes that's more or less all you need.
Kind of interesting in that the visual style looks so up-to-date, but the uniforms are all still woodland BDUs, which were in service at the time but rarely seen given the US' theatres of operation. Much better than that ridiculous grey-blue UCP crap the US was fielding until it got replaced with MultiCam/OCP, although I gather special forces all balked at UCP and used whatever they needed to instead.
Fuqua seems to make morally uncomplicated films where his protagonists brutally right wrongs he's presumably incensed about, so this is just your standard Fuqua, minus the hilariousness of Olympus Has Fallen or the genuine merit of Training Day. I think Fuqua takes some personal gratification with the grisly revenge his protagonists exact in his films, and as far as dumb action satisfaction goes that's more or less all you need.
Kind of interesting in that the visual style looks so up-to-date, but the uniforms are all still woodland BDUs, which were in service at the time but rarely seen given the US' theatres of operation. Much better than that ridiculous grey-blue UCP crap the US was fielding until it got replaced with MultiCam/OCP, although I gather special forces all balked at UCP and used whatever they needed to instead.