apart into a blizzard of quick cuts and special effects. Like the jazzier but equally realistic Black Hawk Down, it shows a situation that has moved beyond policy and strategy and amounts to soldiers in the field, hoping to hell they get home alive." He also said the film gave "full credit" to the Filipino guerrillas who assisted the Rangers. He concluded, "it is good to have a film that is not about entertainment for action fans, but about how wars are won with great difficulty, risk, and cost." Wesley Morris of The Boston Globe criticized a lack of character development and the pace of the film, saying, "On screen, at least, the raid to free the prisoners isn't all that great – just a bunch of explosions and combat maneuvers. Still, it's the one sequence in the film where everybody works with the same conviction. The audience, meanwhile, has to sit around with the prisoners, waiting for this to happen. It's a long wait." He concluded that the film "amounts to a noble failure." Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post praised the film as "a riveting, even inspirational account of an American feat of arms about which few know but about which many more should." He said the film was made more in the style of movies from the 1940s, with the hero being the unit involved in the action instead of individuals, a technique which is rarely used today and explains the "essentially starless" cast drawing mainly from television or film supporting roles. He praised its accuracy, saying, "The war stuff is first-rate all the way through. A great deal of effort has been made to achieve a level of anthropological correctness: The weapons are right, the uniforms are right, the equipment is right...The raid itself is a dynamo of action filmmaking, exactly like what the real thing must have been – swift and brutal, with a lot of shooting and no prisoner-taking." Joel Selvin of the San Francisco Chronicle called the film "very boring"; a "story without irony, perspective or any leavening that would make it something other than an ordinary military-action caper. The story line is telegraphed from word one and the meticulous unfolding plot plods ahead inexorably without the slightest bit of suspense." Roger Moore of the Orlando Sentinel said, "[The characters are] all real people, and much of this really happened. But director John