Given that this incident in Libya happened on September 11, 2012 I am rather surprised that it took this long to make a movie about what happened that day.

Micheal Bay has a very unique way of making movies and I for one mostly find his constant flashing to different scenes method quite annoying, but for this movie; which was a lot like “Black Hawk Down” his style of direction mostly worked, much to my surprise. At times the movie dragged on too long and it took almost full hour before anything really happened.  In the end, soldiers with families were killed and many civilians were in harms way during the raid which started at the Ambassador’s compound and then moved to the CIA location in the city. Given the size of the attack and the weapons used, its rather extraordinary that more people were not killed. The war scenes were very well done and realistic for the most part during this over 2 hour movie.

Chris Stevens US Ambassador to Benghazi Libya was killed in the raid on his compound on September 11, 2012 and as a result major political problems and blame towards Hilary Clinton, who was the Secretary of State at the time, began. The bottom line is that Libya is now a stronghold for ISIS and for the most part there is nothing anyone can do to avoid future attacks like this, including terrorist attacks.  As far as the blame anyone should take for this raid, including Hillary Clinton ; that is ultimately up to each individual to decide on their own. The problem with Congress and investigations like this one is they are always looking for someone to blame for anything that goes wrong, but the real blame for an attack like this is years of mistakes that were made that has enabled terrorism and countries like Libya to exist in the first place.

Despite the slow parts in this movie, and there were several, the tension level was at a high level most of the time and I do recommend this movie which reminded me of the movie “Black Hawk Down”.

13 Hours – IMDB

The logic that people will use when they go see this bad movie is, “Well, Robert De Niro is in it and he would never make a garbage movie, so it just has to be good”. Unfortunately this is also the logic that I used when I decided to see this horrible movie. I could not be more surprised that an actor of the caliber of Robert De Niro could read a script like this, think it was funny or something, and then decide to make it. I often wonder when I see a very bad movie that there must be some kind of favor queue that producers, actors and directors have to endure just to stay in the field and keep making movies. They have to promise to give back a favor to someone who did them a favor in the past and to repay that favor they have to make a horrible movie. Not only is this movie never funny, its actually disgusting in a number of areas. There is one scene in particular at the beginning of this movie that you cannot believe De Niro agreed to play to perhaps even risk losing some of his hard earned respect in the field and some fans along the way.

You have to also wonder what is the count of bad movies an actor can make before his career is over. Zac Efron has made several extremely bad movies lately and you have to figure that he is close to ruining his career very soon after this latest disaster. He also seems to like being naked in many of his movies and for the 2nd time (the last time in the very bad movie Neighbors) he wears a puppet over his genital area as well as being unnecessarily naked in a good deal of this movie. Perhaps the reason for this is that the producers realize that this movie is so bad that the only way to get people to see it would be to have this actor naked so that at least young women might go see it. How about Efron having some kind of integrity or pride in himself as an actor and not make horrible movies like this where he is naked and in humiliating situations so many times. How bad do you want to be an actor? How bad do you need to make the big money? Is it worth humiliating yourself in front of millions of movie goers?

I was also surprised at the amazing overuse of the “F” word in this movie.
De niro and Efron use this word probably 300 times, perhaps even coming close to breaking the over 500 “F” word Tally of the “Wolf of Wall Street”, which came out in 2013. The fundamental issue I bring up again in this blog as I have mentioned before in this blog, “Is being raunchy always funny”. The answer to this question of course is no and this movie proves this point as well as any movie ever has.

Aubrey Plaza is a very funny actress but in this movie even she fails to get ever one laugh. There is a scene at a wedding reception where the actress Julianne Hough is on stage singing a song horrible (on purpose in a failed attempt to be funny) and Zac Efron’s character is trying to tell her that the wedding is off through people in the audience. What followed was a horribly unfunny and lame attempt to communicate what Efron’s character was telling his fiance through some handicapped and old people in the audience. This joke was milked far longer than it should have and from this very first attempt at stupid humor; it failed miserably.

This movie was supposed to be a comedy and nobody laughed in the audience, not even once.

Do yourself a favor and miss this horrible mess, one of the worst movies I have seen in a while.

Dirty Grandpa IMDB

One of the best action movies in recent years was 2013’s “Olympus has Fallen”. This action movie was very well done and in that same year the movie “White House Down” came out and had the exact same idea about terrorists taking over the White House. “White House Down” was good but was not nearly as good as “Olympus has Fallen”.

I am happy to report the release of the sequel to “Olympus has Fallen”, “London Has Fallen” which comes out in March 2016. Below is the movie trailer.