This Week In Tacticool – Act of Valor, SPOILER ALERT

I watched the movie with my daughter Sunday morning. I thought is was a great moive and my favorite part was the river pickup which is shown in the thumbnail of the video.

I did see a blooper in the begining of the movie with the training HALO Jump. If you don't know what a HALO Jump is, research it, watch the movie and I think you'll agree with me.

This Week In Tacticool – Act of Valor, SPOILER ALERT

via Guns For Everyone by El Bombardero on 2/27/12

I went to see this abortion on Saturday night of opening weekend and I’ve got to say, I’ve not seen such patriotic masturbation disguised as cinema since Independence Day.

First thing I noticed about this movie was how everyone around me was telling me that every patriotic American should see it. That was an immediate red alert that this was going to be a flag waving free pass for our government to send perfectly good trained killers overseas to die for resource acquisition and management.

I’ve seen the series on BUDS training, I’ve watched SEAL’s swim in the Coronado Bay with awe, seen the waves they train in on the beaches of Coronado. They are tough and brave motherfuckers.

But this film seeks to exploit that longing that all red blooded Americans have to be tacticool trained killers for our government. I get it, you bought that EOTech but you feel unfulfilled using it to mow down paper targets. This film seeks to plug in the lower functioning parts of our brains that just want to be connected to something so dangerous and beautiful to an experience that lets us all be heroes for our U.S. of A.

The featurette above explains how they used live bullets in the film, every wannabe tacticool operators wet dream. But when hearing about this film, somehow the message got translated to me by some very excited young men that every round in this film was live ammo (except for the sniper rounds). I was skeptical and when watching the movie I was convinced that this was not only not true, but in fact was more hype designed to further stimulate the imaginations of little boys grown into unfulfilled adult men. No, it was not live rounds in the film. The extraction scene with the river boats and miniguns was real, I’ll believe that because there were no people being shot at. But the rest of the film involved rifles being pointed at and firing at real people in tight quarters. No way that was real ammo. No insurance company on the planet would take that gamble.

The whole point of using real SEALs and real bullets and real tactics and real stories and real blah blah blah was to enhance the feeling that this stuff is for real. Yet every grenade thrown at the enemy was an apocalyptic fireball of death, while the grenade that killed the SEAL was really just a glorified fart (I’ve seen airbags deploy with more force than that grenade). In another scene a SEAL takes cover from an AK behind the tailgate of a pickup truck and emerges unscathed. On what planet is that real? The same goes for interior walls and fruit stands. So while on one hand they are touting this as a “real” film about “real SEALs”, they filmakers could not resist including the kind of cliches that turn every action movie into…well, a movie.

Certainly there were fun scenes to watch, but overall this film was nothing more than a patriotic pat on the back for a country that is desperately searching for encouragement that we are not the evil empire that everyone else says we are. The SEALs capture the hearts of this country because they are bad motherfuckers. This film exploits that fascination to help perpetuate the idea that we should all aspire to be hired guns for our military, for that is where the true heroes go to die.

I heard once that the military spends 6 billion dollars a year (billion with a B) on advertising. I’d be willing to bet that this film came from that budget. If it didn’t, it should have.