Sara Stewart

Sara Stewart

Movies

Veterans deserve better than Army biopic ‘12 Strong’

A fascinating story from the days immediately after 9/11 is a natural for the big screen: In October 2001, a small task force of US Army Special Forces troops traveled to Afghanistan, forged a partnership with the Northern Alliance and vanquished a series of Taliban strongholds, liberating the city of Mazar-i-Sharif and creating bonds between the warring factions of the Alliance — a complex achievement honored at Ground Zero with a statue of a soldier on horseback.

Pity that “12 Strong” is the movie tribute they got.

An overlong hash of generic violence, gratuitous gore and hackneyed dialogue, it’s the kind of war film in which you can imagine the special effects crew high-fiving one another for their work with fake-blood squibs — the ones that explode when a combatant is shot in the head. (This happens so often, I lost count.)

It’s macho eye-candy of the cheapest kind, endless scenes of gunfire and explosions and rugged, handsome actors running while shooting and yelling.

Chris “Thor” Hemsworth runs and yells with the best of them as Capt. Mitch Nelson — but to what end?

Mark Nutsch, the real-life soldier Nelson is based on, is reduced to a John Wayne type who makes a promise to the little lady (Elsa Pataky) waiting at home that he’ll make it back in one piece.

Nelson’s men, including Michael Peña, Geoff Stults and Trevante Rhodes, are mired in lines such as, “S–t goes south, I’m dying with my boots on!”

And if you’ve heretofore managed to avoid the online snuff videos in which women are brutally executed by the Taliban for breaking medieval taboos, director Nicolai Fuglsig insists you experience a re-creation of one, in which a teacher with a bloodied burqa is shot in the head as sobbing elementary school-age girl students watch.

For anyone still on the fence about whether the Taliban are good guys, this will be instructive. For the rest of us, it’s pointlessly sadistic.

The film is at its best when centered on Gen. Dostum (Navid Negahban), the weathered Northern Alliance leader working with the Americans. He has some good lines about the appeal of the Taliban’s death cult, the futility of a foreign power going to war in his country (you’re a coward if you leave, and you become the enemy if you stay). Too often, though, he’s relegated to platitudes about warriors’ hearts.

Michael Shannon, always an asset, plays Nelson’s fellow officer, a man with “killer eyes,” as Dostam puts it — actually a pretty spot-on description of Shannon. But in a film where scores of Afghan men fighting alongside the Americans are killed with little fanfare or actual relish, his is the only war wound that’s actually treated with concern.

“12 Strong” should find an audience in anyone who wants to cheer on the life-and-death stakes of military revenge missions, but it’s pretty narrow-minded about which lives matter.