REVIEW - PATRIOTS DAY (PETER BERG)

Peter Berg's latest right-wing propaganda piece is also his most devious. The average American worker is exalted for their devotion to their duty, the forces that dictate the nature of that duty are lambasted for their abstract intelligence, and America's enemies are demonized for their, well, devotion to their duty. Wrapping up their fascist disdain for complex thought in complex distractions only demonstrates the filmmakers' complicity in wilfully peddling the most conservative interpretation available of the facts. Patriots Day is a predictably impressive piece of technical work, and thus impossible for me to dismiss outright, much as I'd love to given the insidious toxicity of its political stance. But it never wholly overcomes that toxicity, instead using its technical competence and an array of diversions to allay the suspicions of its more discerning audience members. Sturdy, muscular filmmaking begets expertly-crafted action sequences featuring effective editing, excellent sound design, and strong stunt work; Berg is a talented director the more he identifies and hones his particular skill set, and the less he wastes his time with lacklustre dramatic content. Patriots Day's screenplay is loaded with scene after scene of the kind of soapy emotional exposition that actors love and that intelligent audiences abhor, most of it blatantly fictional, designed only to deliver further potency to the film's coarsely conservative message. And thus, when it's not focused on its burgeoning capacity for technical prowess, it becomes entirely possible again to dismiss Patriots Day outright, if only for a while. In that regard, at least Peter Berg has given this liberal a little of what he loves to do.

REVIEW - DEEPWATER HORIZON (PETER BERG)

You can always trust a Republican to miss the point entirely, and wilfully so. Yes, I'm getting political, because the story of the Deepwater Horizon disaster was political, whether these filmmakers acknowledge that or not. Their ploy to rope in the average American viewer (and these days, we know all too well what that means) involves the usual negligible concessions to inclusion and positive representation, largely smothered by a blinkered celebration of egotistical, heterosexual, white American machismo. Amid the bluster of Deepwater Horizon, albeit excellently staged, Peter Berg intentionally loses sight of the bigger picture, whilst ensuring to insert certain details that infer that he's not entirely ignorant of the value of context. In pursuit of this skewed slant on reality, Berg's film emphasizes select points, those particularly attractive to his target demographic: mistrust of authority, the dignity of hard work dutifully done, virtues such as loyalty, bravery and compassion. It's respectable stuff, yet coated in a typically self-aggrandizing sheen of standard christian American self-satisfaction, and all the technical brilliance that $156 million can get you can't yet redeem such damning flaws. Berg displays great flair in wielding this brilliance, putting it to smart effect in tense dramatic and thrilling action-esque sequences both; all that money was put to surprisingly solid use, as evidenced in Deepwater Horizon's sensible design, stressing a leanness of style throughout, accentuated by verisimilar craft. By the workers, and for the workers, Deepwater Horizon somehow still manages to rank as among the most conservative studio pictures of the year.