Patriots Day

The scenes of the Boston Marathon blast are really powerful in themselves and the subsequent chase with the terrorists works excellently, primarily the shootout in Watertown is polished and clearly true to life as much as was at all possible. It was maybe unnecessarily too full of pathos and characters (in some places the movie loses momentum terribly). Berg is good at realistic reconstructions, but the mass of authentic shots detracted a little from the power of the picture. There isn’t much shine to Reznor’s soundtrack this time round. (14/01/2018)

Peter Berg's reputation with me has recovered a bit after the recent not very satisfying Deepwater Horizon, but Patriots Day still falls short of the pinnacle of his work. While it is a rather sensitive subject, I still find it odd to make a film about a terrorist attack where only three people died when there are far greater disasters happening in the world. But about the film: The pacing is good, the big shootout is stylish, the filming is solid, and Mark Wahlberg is classically fine again, so I'll give four stars for entertainment. 70% (06/02/2017)

With this film, Peter Berg utilized his previous experience and managed to translate it onto the big screen without any significant mistakes. For me, Berg belongs to the top tier of directors, and I simply won’t hear a bad word about him. This time he chose a well-known event that undoubtedly shook the world for some time in 2013. He didn’t pick an easy topic to direct, but he handled it admirably. The cast is incredibly strong, each name a notable figure in the film industry. Although the pace was slow at the beginning, after the explosions, it accelerated to high gear and didn’t stop. The combination of film and documentary inserts might seem poor to some for this kind of movie, but Berg knows what he’s doing, and as a viewer, it grabbed my attention even more. The camera work and music perfectly follow his style, as if I were watching The Kingdom again. The best moment was the nearly ten-minute-long sequence of continuous gunfire in Watertown, combined with spectacular bomb explosions. I haven’t seen such a raw, authentic-looking, and even goosebump-inducing shootout in a long time. You can clearly see years of practice here because coordinating the filming of something like this is no simple task, especially with such a great final result. There was definitely a resemblance to Mann’s Heat. The ending, with the real people who lived through this event, squeezed out a lot of emotion, but if it hadn’t been there, I would have been upset. We’ll see what Berg brings us in the coming years. This director has a bright future ahead of him, so I think we have a lot to look forward to. I give it 92%. (27/03/2017)

Peter Berg finally graduated as a filmmaker with flying colours, spoiled only by Wahlberg, whom I didn't believe as a policeman. A lot of people here are praising the shootout, but I would single out other moments. In the beginning Berg gives a great dose of suspense, when you know what is coming but you are still on your toes, the insight into the FBI investigation was interesting (the whole reconstruction with hi-tech gadgets) and the scene of the interrogation of the wife of one of the terrorists was excellent. I didn't mind the pathos, that's just the way America is, proud. The final soaring speeches were somehow superfluous, I could have done without them. PS: Extra points for assuring us that terrorists are idiots who believe 9/11 was a plot by the US government. You don't have to go far to see that there are plenty of such morons walking around the world. Just read the reader comments on Novinky.cz and you’ll see that yes, this is a clear demonstration of the "flowering of the intellectual elite of the Czech nation". (29/04/2017)

A well-grasped narrative style. The main characters are introduced while explaining the concept of the plot twist, the key event of the bombing and the gradually tightening noose. Something similar worked very well in Zero Dark Thirty, with the difference that it was better balanced dramaturgically. Patriots Day has a lot of pathetic dross in the form of testimony from actual witnesses to the event and various pieces of wisdom from the main characters that are not very on point, and when they are, they are just clumsily handled. If you overlook this shortcoming and the fact that it steals a good 10-20 minutes from the film, you can't help but marvel at Berg's grasp of action and the dynamics of the action sequences, because the shootout in the streets is frenetic, volatile and yet incredibly raw and clear – and it’s also the scene after which the end credits should have rolled. If he could work with characters and the build-up of the story like Michael Mann, we'd all be whistling because it would be a full-on hit. (20/03/2017)