To start with: I am ex something and I have been working as a contractor myself for the last 18 years. Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Libya ... been there, worked there, as well for private firms as for NGOs and also some GOs.
Now to this film: It's a good flick, yet overly dramatized and in a certain way quite inaccurate. It's a caricatural portrayal - and I didn't expect anything else coming from Hollywood - of the private security and military industry as some "shady, dubious, greedy and highly illegal" entity that collaborates with The Government and does stuff they can't officially do. Yes, stuff like that does unfortunately exist, but this doesn't even scratch the 0,1% mark of all the work internationally and if Mark Zuckerberg's social network would fact-check this it would not even get a "mostly false", but proper "fake news" stamp. You can't depict a complete industry by single incidents.
But hey, it's Hollywood, it's what they like to pass as a message, because looking at the direction they have taken over the last twenty years, it has become clear they don't seem to be any more interested in producing entertainment and making profit, but rather to function as political and (pseudo)-moral activists no matter the cost. Hence also the obligatory inclusion of the word "mercenary", because THAT'S what it comes all down to for Hollywood .... and they couldn't be any more wrong than that.
Chris Pine does a solid performance and the chemistry with Ben Foster is clearly there. The plot is over simplified by people not familiar with the industry and who must have written their story based on hearsay, NYT articles and a good portion of (bad) imagination. The movie doesn't know exactly what it wants to be: An action flick? Well, not quite, with too much drama and talking. A drama? Well, not quite either, with too much action. So it sits somewhere in between and is neither a pleaser for fans of one or the other. Still, the production value is there, the cast is there ... unfortunately the film isn't quite. It's absolutely fine for a one-time watch, just don't believe every lie they try to sell as The Truth. But coming from a biased director, who had done in the past a biased documentary about Guantanamo Bay called "Gitmo", the result was unsurprising.
Now to this film: It's a good flick, yet overly dramatized and in a certain way quite inaccurate. It's a caricatural portrayal - and I didn't expect anything else coming from Hollywood - of the private security and military industry as some "shady, dubious, greedy and highly illegal" entity that collaborates with The Government and does stuff they can't officially do. Yes, stuff like that does unfortunately exist, but this doesn't even scratch the 0,1% mark of all the work internationally and if Mark Zuckerberg's social network would fact-check this it would not even get a "mostly false", but proper "fake news" stamp. You can't depict a complete industry by single incidents.
But hey, it's Hollywood, it's what they like to pass as a message, because looking at the direction they have taken over the last twenty years, it has become clear they don't seem to be any more interested in producing entertainment and making profit, but rather to function as political and (pseudo)-moral activists no matter the cost. Hence also the obligatory inclusion of the word "mercenary", because THAT'S what it comes all down to for Hollywood .... and they couldn't be any more wrong than that.
Chris Pine does a solid performance and the chemistry with Ben Foster is clearly there. The plot is over simplified by people not familiar with the industry and who must have written their story based on hearsay, NYT articles and a good portion of (bad) imagination. The movie doesn't know exactly what it wants to be: An action flick? Well, not quite, with too much drama and talking. A drama? Well, not quite either, with too much action. So it sits somewhere in between and is neither a pleaser for fans of one or the other. Still, the production value is there, the cast is there ... unfortunately the film isn't quite. It's absolutely fine for a one-time watch, just don't believe every lie they try to sell as The Truth. But coming from a biased director, who had done in the past a biased documentary about Guantanamo Bay called "Gitmo", the result was unsurprising.