Director: Peter Berg
Year Released: 2016
Rating: 2.0
Reenactment of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing by the Tsarnaev brothers (played here by Alex Wolff and Themo Melikidze) and the ensuing manhunt, with the movie centered around a Boston cop (Mark Wahlberg) with a bum knee. Berg aims for efficiency and briskness, and to some degree he accomplishes both, immediately introducing the soon-to-be victims and getting through the details (once the Feds show up it becomes a TV crime procedural): carjacking, shootout, tenuous resolution, mandatory flag waving. There isn't much probing into the mindset of the Tsarnaevs (Katherine, Tamerlan's widow, appears brainwashed) and the forces that drove them to commit such an atrocity, but one's dead and the other's soon to be dead so Let Freedom Ring I guess. I'm glad Berg chose to include a scene where they admit the Intelligence Community was fully aware of the brothers' radicalized nature - based on a warning from the Russians (!) - but did little to closely monitor them.
