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Jul 27, 2017white_cobra_21 rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
The first part of the movie - the lead up to marathon day is incredibly well done, showing the various people, what they are up and how they end up where they are on that fateful day. The rest of the movie is good, but I can't rate it great. The Mark Wahlberg character is a plot device, they combined the actions of many different officers into his character as the one person that connects all the different things that happened in those 4 days. Unfortunately, the movie suffers a bit for it, as they have to go through the effort to show Wahlberg getting to all these different places. I think it would have made for a better movie to have a three or four separate officers represent all these events, and have written the story to go back and forth between these events - I think movie goers are sophisticated enough to follow along. Three ways the movie shines the most: pacing, you never feel a dullness, nor should we!; putting the humanity in this tragedy, from the officers' peril to the real individuals harmed by this attack to the hateful and empty lives of the Muslim attackers; and finally the realness of events, Berg and the film-makers went to great pains to show reality, and not blow it out of proportion for Hollywood's sake - and it makes an indelible mark on how officers risked their lives to protect anyone else from being harmed by these radical Islamic terrorists. Overall, a good film, gave it three stars, but the short-comings kept me from rating it higher.