*** outta *****

3 outta 5

12 Strong is a sturdy war movie.  Great war movies can get into shades of grey and have some thematic depth.  This is not that type of film.  Even though 12 Strong is a wee bit jingoistic about how great the U.S. soldiers are, it’s not abrasively so.  And even though the dialogue is pretty rote and the characters are fairly dull, it’s not annoyingly so.  What makes it a sturdy war movie is mostly the fact that the big booms are satisfyingly loud.  

Mitch (Chris Hemsworth) is a U.S. military captain who has only been on drills in his career and is looking for a desk job.  The attacks of September 11^th, 2001 change his mind and he wants to lead his crew of soldiers into Afghanistan to fight the Taliban.  Despite some reluctance from his superiors, Mitch is given soldiers like Spencer (Michael Shannon), Sam (Michael Pena), Ben (Trevante Rhodes) and more.  Once on the ground, they are assigned to work with an anti-Taliban general, Dostum (Navid Negahban), who wants to keep the Americans away from the fight, even though Mitch and his crew need to mark targets for bombers.  To get along the inhospitable Afghanistan terrain, the soldiers are assigned horses to ride which they have to learn as they go.  Frustrated with being held back, Mitch wants in on the front lines but a nasty Taliban leader, Khaled (Fahim Fazli), is standing in their way.   

Hemsworth is a likeable lead and he’s in very serious mode here which is a bit of a shame because his work in the Marvel films has shown he can be very funny. Even without combat experience, Colonel Mulholland (William Fichtner) is telling Mitch he’s the only one who “gets it” so he can lead the mission.  Which is sort random and hard to accept but coming from the stern Fichtner, it seems legitimately correct.  Hemsworth’s American accent doesn’t exactly sound quite right as his Australian accent sort of peeks around the edges every once in awhile.  But it wouldn’t be a war movie without someone doing a wobbly accent.

As the older veteran, Shannon plays Spencer as the seen it all wise elder.  Shannon is usually able to elevate anything but here he’s kind of dull.  Not to say he’s bad, as he gets some comedic value out of having an injured back his first time riding a horse, and if anyone can glower with conviction, it’s Michael Shannon.   He also gets to play the guy who was on his way to retirement and goes back for one last mission, which is a fun trope.   Pena and Rhodes are the two regular guys and Pena brings humour at unexpected moments.  Rhodes has an even smaller part but he’s paired with an Afghan kid who is assigned to look after the American which leads to a cliché but effective bit when they come under fire.  The rest of the unit are indistinguishable aside from if they have different haircuts or are wearing sunglasses. 

Negahban as the general wants his country back from the Taliban but he’s also in-fighting along other armies. It’s an interesting view into how the USA views the anti-Taliban fighters as the “Northern Alliance” but they’re really a group of random militias who are constantly trying to kill each other. Negahban gets in a great speech when he says that Afghanistan is a place where Empires go to die and even though they are allies with the Americans now, it is inevitable they will become enemies.  As the main Taliban baddie, Fazli gets a nasty, if extremely over the top, introduction where he terrorizes a group of Afghanistan citizens for educating their daughters.   It makes him easily hateable. 

The main hook is that the US soldiers are riding on horseback which mostly just leads to a fun scene where the guys are awkwardly learning how to ride and the finale where Mitch leads a charge of soldiers on horseback against the Taliban that is pretty dang epic. There isn’t anything deeper about a connection with their horses which is probably for the best.  For a movie that takes place in a sandblasted wasteland it looks really fantastic and the explosions are dramatic to behold.  It takes a good long while to deliver some boom but it pays off, especially when Mitch has to get closer to a Taliban target to tell the air support to drop bombs.   Like a lot of war movies, there is a sampling of the home life for the soldiers to give them some emotional resonance that the movie frankly didn’t need.  12 Strong is at its best when it concentrates on the visceral moments of combat and ramping up tension, like when a group of Taliban surrender and Spencer has to sort out if it’s a threat or not. 

12 Strong doesn’t do anything new in the war genre but it does work within the confines well.  It’s a bit too chatty and a bit too long, and the characters aren’t quite interesting enough for us to care if they live or die, but when it focuses on being a messy, bloody battle, it can be rather gripping.