'Patriots Day': A Painful, Painstaking Depiction Of The Boston Marathon Bombing 
 
 Enlarge this image toggle caption Karen Ballard/CBS Films Karen Ballard/CBS Films 
 
 The firm of Wahlberg and Berg, LLC is a highly specialized one. Patriots Day, an absorbing and detail-rich account of the terrorist bombing of the 2013 Boston Marathon and the four-day manhunt that followed, marks the third time in three years that director Peter Berg and star Mark Wahlberg have collaborated to dramatize recent history. (Deepwater Horizon, their thriller about the 2010 Transocean oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, came out all of four months ago.) 
 
 This time, Wahlberg plays Boston Police Sergeant Tommy Saunders, a detective who, as a final act of penance for some never-explicated transgression that got him suspended, happens to be posted in uniform ("the clown suit," he calls it) at the finish line when the two bombs go off. (Berg shot some scenes at the 2016 Boston Marathon, though not his reenactment of the bombings, obviously.) Somehow every cop in the city, including the commissioner of police himself, knows Tommy well enough to call out his name when they see him, but there's no reason why you should remember it: Unlike the people played by the other A-listers in the film's sprawling cast, Saunders is fictitious. He's no crack-shot Hollywood super-cop, though, just a dedicated and very tired flatfoot with a bad knee. (He spends the movie limping and begging E.R. nurses for Tylenol.) Middle age has dulled former Calvin Klein poster boy Wahlberg's looks just enough to let us buy him in this sort of everyman role. Saunders is genuinely shaken by the horror he witnesses — the bombing killed three people and injured more than 250 — and Wahlberg makes you believe it. 
 
 Dropping in a made-up character to witness key events in the investigation, Forrest Gump-style, is a risky move, but one that allows Berg and his co-screenwriters Matt Cook and Joshua Zetumer to avoid potentially more damaging storyscaping elsewhere. Though its efforts to keep Saunders in the mix occasionally become comical — in one scene, the FBI calls him in from home to get information they could've obtained by looking at a map — Patriots Day otherwise sticks close to the facts of the case, complicated and random though they are. There are an inconvenient number of supporting characters. It's the sort of movie where the exact time and the number of hours elapsed since the bombing frequently appear in the bottom left corner of the frame, while another aerial shot of the skyline reminds us that the effects of the investigation are rippling out citywide. 
 
 Jeffrey Pugliese, the Watertown Police sergeant played by J.K. Simmons, is a real person, instrumental in the capture of chief bomber Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Themo Melikidze). So is FBI Special Agent Richard DesLauriers, played by Kevin Bacon, and Boston Police commissioner Ed Davis, embodied by the John Goodman. (This is the rare movie where Goodman does not dominate every scene he's in.) Although the actors playing them are less famous, Jessica Kensky and Patrick Downes, a young husband and wife who between them lost three legs to injuries sustained in the bombing, are real, too. As with so many other well-made recent films about real people — Sully, Hidden Figures — Patriots Day caps off its reenactment with a coda featuring the people whose lives it has fictionalized, all musing on how the tragedy brought out the best in Boston. 
 
 While it's natural to be suspicious of these kinds of feel-good homilies, they're balanced out by Berg's persuasive depiction of the chaos of the investigation: residents ordered to remain in their homes, the FBI forced by a FOX News leak to release photos of the suspects to the public despite fears it would jeopardize the investigation and lead to attacks on innocent Muslims, poor coordination among law enforcement agencies. The movie's one big action set piece, a shootout between police and the Tasarnaev brothers in a residential neighborhood in Watertown, just west of Boston, is appropriately frightening and disorienting. 
 
 Berg has occasionally been accused of jingoism. The Kingdom, his 2007 action thriller about about FBI agents investigating the bombing of an American oil company's housing complex in Saudi Arabia, beat the war drums hard. He shows more delicacy here. In the movie's most chilling scene, the American wife of dead suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev — played by Melissa Benoist, TV's Supergirl no less — is explicitly denied access to an attorney and interrogated by a Muslim woman from an unnamed agency while even DesLauriers, Bacon's G-Man, stands by, agape. 
 
 It's the way that Berg is alive to the tension and moral murk of scenes like this that elevates Patriots Day to something slightly better than just a sharply executed procedural. It isn't quite Captain Phillips or Zero Dark Thirty, but it's a more thoughtful and restrained film than you might've been expecting. ||||| 'Patriots Day': Film Review | AFI Fest 2016 
 
 Kinetic, well cast and technically impressive — but not as stirring as it might have been. TWITTER 
 
 In his third collaboration with director Peter Berg, Mark Wahlberg plays a cop investigating the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. 
 
 Like the heroic Bostonians it celebrates, civilians and law enforcement both, Peter Berg’s Patriots Day gets the job done. The director’s second big-screen release of the year — and his third portrait of frontline heroism starring Mark Wahlberg, after Lone Survivor and Deepwater Horizon — the movie is, for Berg, a characteristically high-powered rendition of a real-world disaster that’s still fresh in the collective memory. If nothing else, Berg proves himself a master of filmmaking efficiency; he made this technically complex action piece, which took its bow in the closing-night slot at AFI Fest, in a matter of months. Set for a limited holiday opening in New York, Los Angeles and Boston, it should click strongly with moviegoers, especially after its mid-January expansion into the heartland. 
 
 Written by Berg, Matt Cook and Joshua Zetumer, the movie is a countdown thriller to a disaster we all know is coming. Beginning hours before the 2013 edition of Boston’s world-renowned race and moving through the manhunt that follows it, the story jumps among survivors, first responders and investigators, with Wahlberg filling the Everyman shoes, and providing a typically likable focal point, as fictional character Tommy Saunders, a sergeant with the Boston PD. 
 
 As Saunders, Wahlberg is no less engaging than in any of his somewhat underappreciated screen performances. Yet this is the least interesting of the men of duty he’s played for Berg, more a stand-in for the American working-class hero than a fully fleshed character, albeit one who’s married to an exceptionally clear-eyed woman, played with dependable grit by Michelle Monaghan. It’s no fault of Wahlberg’s when his brief third-act monologue remains a screenwriterly statement of theme, never finding a pulse. 
 
 But as a man of action, he’s thoroughly convincing. Fighting his way back from an injury that has sidelined him on the job, Saunders considers his marathon-day assignment an insult. With his neon-yellow vest, he feels like a crossing guard in a clown suit, but when the spring day is shattered by incomprehensible violence, he springs into action, limp and all. In the ensuing days of investigation, he puts his homicide experience to work to interview victims and witnesses, his know-how explained rather than explored. 
 
 With a strong assist from production designer Tom Duffield, Berg captures the fascinating speed and precision with which the feds, led by FBI Special Agent Richard DesLauriers (a fittingly terse Kevin Bacon), set up a command center in the Black Falcon Terminal, a vintage warehouse on the city’s waterfront, for their digital and DNA forensics. Even so, procedural matters aren’t Berg’s focus so much as the on-the-ground manhunt and its every high-octane thrill. 
 
 But first, the setup. It’s a given that every introduced character will be, in one way or another, a victim of the attacks. They include a young married couple (Rachel Brosnahan, Christopher O’Shea), an MIT security guard (Jake Picking) and Dun Meng (a superb Jimmy O. Yang), the Chinese app designer whose carjacking by the Tsarnaevs is by far the most tense, suspenseful and involving portion of the movie. 
 
 Elsewhere, the film offers up generic clashes between local cops and the feds, with John Goodman’s Ed Davis, commissioner of the Boston Police Department, sounding off in favor of swift action. Bacon’s FBI honcho has no less a sense of urgency, but he’s more attuned to political currents and potential pitfalls, and seeks a more measured public stance — until, that is, the identifying surveillance photos of the perpetrators, Tamerlan (Themo Melikidze) and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (Alex Wolff), are leaked to Fox News. 
 
 Melikidze and Wolff lend nuance to their portrayals of the brothers — respectively, threateningly charismatic controller and seemingly depressive acolyte — but the Tsarnaevs aren’t of particular interest to Berg except as villains. As for the elder Tsarnaev’s wife (Melissa Benoist), she figures in a standout scene in which an enigmatic police interrogator, played commandingly by Khandi Alexander, reads her the riot act. J.K. Simmons is the epitome of old-school cool as Sergeant Jeffrey Pugliese of the police department in neighboring Watertown, where Dzhokhar’s attempted escape famously ends in a backyard boat. 
 
 Berg recreates the marathon explosions themselves with full-frontal pandemonium, a confusion of blood and noise as limbs are severed and families are torn apart, rushed to separate hospitals. While Tobias A. Schliessler’s restless camerawork expertly evokes the unspeakable panic and confusion, it can also feel self-consciously kinetic. Pulling back from explicit imagery, he crafts striking aerial shots of the city that poignantly suggest its upheaval. Throughout the film, the score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross intensifies the action with its relentless jabs and tremors, from chords to ticks to clangs to heart-pounding drumbeats. 
 
 Yet however technically proficient the movie, however heartfelt its admiration for everyone who worked feverishly to contain the damage, nothing in the narrative proves remotely as affecting as the documentary footage and interviews that Berg includes at film’s end. Some stories don’t require special effects. 
 
 Distributor: CBS Films/Lionsgate 
 
 Production companies: Closest to the Hole Productions, Leverage Entertainment, Bluegrass Films, Hutch Parker Entertainment 
 
 Cast: Mark Wahlberg, Kevin Bacon, John Goodman, J.K. Simmons, Michelle Monaghan, Alex Wolff, Themo Melikidze, James Colby, Michael Beach, Rachel Brosnahan, Christopher O’Shea, Jake Picking, Jimmy O. Yang, Vincent Curatola, Melissa Benoist, Khandi Alexander 
 
 Director: Peter Berg 
 
 Screenwriters: Peter Berg, Matt Cook, Joshua Zetumer 
 
 Producers: Scott Stuber, Mark Wahlberg, Hutch Parker, Dylan Clark, Stephen Levinson, Dorothy Aufiero, Michael Radutzky 
 
 Executive producers: Eric Johnson, Paul Tamasy, Nicholas Nesbitt, Dan Wilson, John Logan Pierson, Louis G. Friedman 
 
 Director of photography: Tobias A. Schliessler 
 
 Production designer: Tom Duffield 
 
 Costume designer: Virginia B. Johnson 
 
 Editors: Gabriel Fleming, Colby Parker Jr. 
 
 Composers: Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross 
 
 Casting: Sheila Jaffe 
 
 Rated R, 133 minutes
– Less than four years after the real-life event, director Peter Berg has brought us Hollywood's version of the Boston Marathon bombing with Patriots Day, centering on a fictional Boston police sergeant (Mark Wahlberg) whose experiences are based on the real ones of several people. Here's what critics are saying: The film can't evoke the same kind of stirring emotion as the real-life footage shown at the end, but it's still "kinetic, well cast, and technically impressive," writes Sheri Linden at the Hollywood Reporter. The "restless camerawork expertly evokes the unspeakable panic and confusion" while "Berg recreates the marathon explosions themselves with full-frontal pandemonium." In other words, it "gets the job done." It's an "absorbing and detail-rich account" that "sticks close to the facts" for the most part and includes scenes that are "appropriately frightening and disorienting," writes Chris Klimek at NPR. "While it's natural to be suspicious of these kinds of feel-good homilies," Berg delivers "a more thoughtful and restrained film than you might've been expecting." But Ty Burr offers a Bostonian's perspective, noting Patriots Day is "telling us what we've seen with our own eyes," only this version is "reshaped for maximum dramatic impact and sold back to us with famous names attached," he writes at the Boston Globe. Sure, "everyone involved with this movie believes they're acting with respect, even when they’re not." But "at best, it's unnecessary. At worst, it's vaguely insulting." Calvin Wilson couldn't disagree more. "Far from being exploitative, Patriots Day honors the Bostonians who responded to terrorism with strength," he writes at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. It's "a fast-moving drama with impressive attention to detail" and a "fine ensemble cast" including Melissa Benoist, who's "a revelation" as Tamerlan Tsarnaev's wife.