Mark Wahlberg along with director Peter Berg and his production company have been successful the last few years in buying the real life stories for the movies, Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon and now Patriots Day. It must have been a difficult challenge to buy three true stories like this, given the competition and realizing that these are three of the best real life stories to come out in many years, Patriots Day being the most important.

Patriots Day is about the April 15, 2013 bombing at the Boston Marathon, which at the time, was the second worst terrorist attack on American soil since 911. The explosions killed 3 civilians, including one 8 year old boy and injured an estimated 264 others, who were treated in 27 local hospitals. At least 14 people required amputations, with some suffering traumatic amputations as a direct result of the blasts. Eleven days later, 29 remained hospitalized, one in critical condition. Many victims had lower leg injuries and shrapnel wounds, which indicated the devices were low to the ground. At least sixteen civilians lost limbs, at the scene or by amputation in a hospital, and three lost more than one limb. Two police officers were also killed.

When you see this movie and realize that two sick diseased animals packed two pressure cookers with small ball bearings that had no other purpose than to both kill human beings and remove arms and legs you have an idea of the level of evil in these two terrorists. One of the terrorists Tamerlan Tsarnaev was killed during a shootout with the police and his younger brother Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was later captured and is now on death row. What I found most telling about the shootout with the terrorists was how intense it was, almost like a war battle and the terrorists actually threw self-made bombs at the police. In the end, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was shot and killed by the police and then run over by his own brother who evaded capture during the shootout and was found days later hiding in a boat, parked on someones driveway.

Before the final shootout, the two terrorists assassinated an MIT college police officer, supposedly to get his gun. What didn’t make sense here was why did they kill a police officer to get his gun when they already had more than enough weapons? Perhaps it was because of panic or just plain stupidity that they killed the police officer and you had to wonder if they didn’t do this one stupid act, perhaps they could have escaped, at least for a few more days or weeks. The Terrorists later kidnapped a college student to steal his car, who later escaped and because he had memorized the GPS number of his Mercedes, the two terrorists were cornered by the police some hours later.

I thought that the acting in Patriots day was very well done, including Mark Wahlberg and John Goodman, who play Boston Police Officers,
Michelle Monaghan who plays Wahlberg’s wife and Kevin Bacon, who plays Special FBI Agent Richard DesLauriers who was in charge of the investigation. I was very impressed by the warehouse that was put together right after the two bombings that acted as a hub to investigate the crimes, and this included a very impressive recreation of streets where the two bombings occurred that lead to the investigators figuring out the location of the terrorists at various times outside the businesses on these streets, eventually leading to their identification through cell phone videos and surveillance cameras. I thought that the technology and facial recognition software was very impressive during this part of the movie. Unfortunately, the photos were leaked to the press which forced the FBI to release them to the public before they wanted to and this caused major conflicts between the Boston Police and the FBI.

The film Patriots day is up to the task of showing all that happened during the days in April 2013 where the Boston Marathon bombings occurred and I highly recommend this movie.

The movie “Sleepless” is about drug pushers, kidnapping, DEA Investigators, crooked cops, honest cops, undercover cops, Cocaine, gunfights, fist fights and the mob. We have seen all of this before, many times and there is nothing really groundbreaking or unusual about this film, other than the fact that this entire story takes place within a 12 hour time period, mostly at night, much like the TV series 24 where each entire season takes place within one day. The action is fast moving and in many cases engrossing and entertaining enough. Early in the story, the main character, played by Jamie Fox is stabbed and throughout the rest of this movie he is bleeding from his abdomen. What doesn’t make sense is how he is able to have so many fights, many of which he wins when he is almost bleeding to death. This is a major logic flaw in the story that could have been easily fixed, but it was not. There are other flaws in this movie as well, but they are mostly covered up by some of the action scenes.

The actress Michelle Monaghan plays a police internal investigator who gets involved with dangerous drug pushers, along with Jamie Foxx and this leads to many chase scenes, fights and shootouts throughout a gambling casino in Las Vegas, which I thought was an unusual venue for a police drama.

Overall I thought this film was entertaining enough, but the unique 12-hour real time idea for this movie was not enough to give this film any more than a very marginal recommendation.