Netflix Instant Queue Movie Review "Act of Valor" (2012)

Image Source

Movie: "Act of Valor"
Director: Mike McCoy, Scott Waugh
Year: 2012
Rating: R
Running Time: 1 hour, 50 minutes

A tight knit Navy Seal team is called upon to rescue a captured CIA agent who holds information of a connection between an international drug dealer and a known terrorist. They must rescue the agent, have the intelligence analyzed and then thwart the impending terrorist plot set to take place on US soil. 

Navy Seals might be damn fine soldiers, but they sure as shit can't act. It's easier for actual actors to fake being soldiers as opposed to actual soldiers acting. There's no discounting the very great, very real work that soldiers do to protect our country, but this movie just isn't all that great. It relies only on the gimmick that real life soldiers ARE the actors to market it. Though the subject matter could be considered compelling, we're not huge fans of war in general, but really, who is? As always, we put our own feelings about matters like this aside to be completely unbiased. On its surface, this is a very pro-military film that is overly patriotic, almost like a propaganda film, and we remember that resonating with us strongly when we first saw the trailer a few years back. The movie posters may as well have been Uncle Sam "I WANT YOU" posters because it was all a very gung-ho, macho type of subject matter. Beyond this, it felt like a bunch of random, disjointed events all occurring at once that were loosely connected without any real plot to drive these events. This might be how operations are run and carried out in the actual U.S. military, but if that's the case, we're better off not knowing what goes on behind the scenes. Though the idea was interesting enough to rope us in to eventually watching this on Netflix, it really wasn't anything we hadn't seen before and done better by actual actors. We're rather indifferent to this movie, and though it seems crass to say so, it will undoubtedly be added to the pile of movies that we forgot we had seen in no time.

My Rating: 5/10
BigJ's Rating: 5/10
IMDB's Rating: 6.5/10
Rotten Tomatoes Rating: 25%
Do we recommend this movie: Meh.