Act of Valor (2012)

Act of Valor (2012)

4/10

Starring
Roselyn Sánchez
Nestor Serrano
Emilio Rivera

Directed by Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh

This movie runs for 100 minutes, and more than 30 of those minutes are weird, inconclusive, unnecessary, and not useful to the plot in any way. Just a waste of reel.

If you find yourself thinking, maybe the plot could be better — it wasn’t. I wonder how the movie would have played out if real actors were used. Sad thing is, you have to sit through over an hour of child play-acting that I can boldly say I could have acted better.

Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh of Bandito Brothers Production decided to use actual Navy SEALs as their cast, which is the reason why the acting was that bad. The truth is, a mule is a mule no matter how much you train it or dress it up. If you take it to the racetrack, it still won’t be able to keep up with real racehorses. Same here. Navy SEALs are SEALs, not actors.

The movie plot goes: an Islamic terrorist group wanted to blow up places in the USA, and he got the guys to do it. The Navy SEALs went on a rescue mission to save a captured CIA agent and then stumbled on the above plan, so they had to stop the suicide bombers.

In the area of cinematography, I can say they started well. Good shots, until after a while they switched to a night-view camera focus that looked like I was playing a video game. The thought that the director believed that was a good idea baffles me. The POV view gives a different experience from looking at things from a wide angle shot, and that switch marred the cinematographic experience.

The movie lines are dull, and the only thing that would keep you from sleeping off is the action that keeps happening. They weren’t bad, but to me, they seemed uncoordinated.

The directors didn’t even try to breathe life into the movie. They just let it play out like in the days of Van Damme and Dolph Lundgren, where you just keep watching and hope things end well. The directors’ idea of how the heroic events should play out didn’t go well with me.

When I see movies like this, I wonder who were the executive producers who also saw it and felt this is good to go?

Or better still, who were the studio executives who heard of this idea and thought it was a good idea to cast actual Navy Seals instead of real-life actors?

It is not worth the watch, so don’t bother.