Everything in director Michael Bay’s cinematic vocabulary — the glamorizing slo-mo, the falling bomb point-of-view shots, the low-angle framing of his heroes with blue sky, fireballs or an American flag in the background — suggests not real life, or the way things might have happened, but a Michael Bay movie.
It’s true of the “Transformers” movies and it’s true of “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi.” Bay’s latest is a mixed-up blend of truth and distortion. Parts of it deliver a punch, and a jolt, and ripples of earnest (and even complicated) emotion. Then the characters, some of them composites or fabrications, start talking again. The cliches tumble out. And Bay gets preoccupied with delivering audience-baiting “kill shots,” engineered to appease our bloodlust and avenge our enemies.
At such moments “13 Hours” becomes less convincing in its interpretation of what happened Sept. 11-12, 2012, when terrorists attacked two Central Intelligence Agency compounds (one official, one unofficial) in Benghazi, Libya. The key figures here, the men who helped Mitchell Zuckoff write the account on which Bay’s film is based, are members of the CIA’s sub-contracted GRS, or Global Response Staff. Six members of what was known as the Annex Security Team were hired to protect CIA staffers at the compounds.
Photographed in Malta, doubling for Libya, “13 Hours” begins with the usual introductions of the six GRS security personnel soon to be under siege. John Krasinski of “The Office” plays Jack Silva, the most amiable of the guys, who has left a wife and children behind to make a living, keep the adrenaline going and serve a higher cause in a dangerous place. James Badge Dale portrays the stalwart Tyrone “Rone” Woods, a natural leader and a bullheaded adversary to the sniveling CIA base chief (David Costabile) who symbolizes everything wrong with foreign policy, in Bay’s eyes, under the Obama administration.
