Review No.138: Act of Valor

In my last review, of Strippers Vs. Werewolves, I mentioned that none of the cast realised they were in a comedy and I think that goes double for my next film Act of Valor in that it wasn't intended to be a comedy in the first place. Act of Valor's unique selling point is that the actors portraying the Navy SEALs in this film aren't actually actors at all but real members of the navy whose identities have been protected as the cast list only reveals the names of the other players in the film. Act of Valor has some interesting statistics such as that it had the biggest budget for a film that doesn't have any star names attached to it while the first promo for it was put at the start of the Battlefield 3 video game which doesn't surprise me as directors Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh almost treat this like a video game most of the time. The plot, if you can call it that, involves a group of SEALs tasked with retrieving a rather attractive Latina CIA agent from the hands of an evil Russian drug kingpin who also has plans to blow up parts of the world with suicide vests which are specially-made due to the ball-bearings system that they operate, I'm seriously not making this up. Obviously all the SEALs have their own stereotypical identities one is about to become a father, another used to be a fighter while the narrator of the piece Lt. Rourke is seemingly a bit of a loner. The SEALs rescue CIA agent Morales with ease however they then set about on their next mission involving more terrorists this time in Somalia however they are warned by their commander not to strike straight away as he doesn't want another Black Hawk Down on his hands.

Of course the commander needn't have worried as Act of Valor is never going to trouble Black Hawk Down in terms of Somalia-set war movies and indeed I found almost insulting that that got a mention in this joke of a war film. I use joke in the very sense of the word as at times I felt I was watching a spoof of the recent 'war on terror' movies the best way to describe it was as a live action Team America as the seven SEALs make their way through various countries, blowing parts of them up as they go along I'm just surprised that none of them uttered a 'you're welcome!' before they hopped onto their submarine. The unintentional hilarity reached its peak in a scene in which one of the marines dies after leaping onto a grenade to stop it exploding which is shot in a slow motion with sad music playing over the top of the entire scene. Sometimes using non-actors in films does work however that isn't true of Act of Valor whose cast mainly just shout things at each other such as 'SECURE THE BRIDGE' and even in the more sensitive scenes in which they're meant to allow their characters to develop they instead just spout out a lot of expositional lines which I suppose is also the fault of screenwriter Kurt Johnstad. Even the actual actors, who mainly portray the bad guys or the CIA agents, are rubbish and are mainly tasked with playing clichéd foreigners such as the evil Arab or the cunning Soviet. I think I enjoyed Act of Valor more than I should've done mainly due to the fact that I was entertained by just how bad it was from the acting to the script to the scene upon scene of random shooting the only thing I took out of it was that navy SEALs are on the whole generally quite stupid. I personally believe there's room to do a spoof movie based on Act of Valor, sort of a Hot Shots! for the new millennium, it's just a shame that Leslie Nielsen has already left us as he would've made an excellent commander.

Verdict: Really bad to the point of being unintentionally hilarious there's no escaping the fact that Act of Valor is a poorly-acted piece of pro-Marines propaganda which should never have gone anywhere near a cinema screen however I can't say I wasn't entertained by the awfulness of the whole endeavour so I will award it a generous 2.5/10