Patriots Day

Patriots Day (2016) covers the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and the four days that followed. Peter Berg builds it like a documentary: real surveillance footage, radio traffic, a clock running through the whole thing. Its most contested decision is Tommy Saunders, played by Mark Wahlberg. No such officer existed. He is a composite invented for the film, and he is present at every decisive moment: the finish line, the investigation, the Watertown shootout. Piling the work of hundreds of real people onto one fictional hero sits badly against the film's claim to accuracy. The best stretch of the film, by contrast, is entirely true. Dun Meng, whose car was hijacked, is a real person, and his escape genuinely broke the case open. The film leaves it more or less as it happened. Some survivors and relatives objected to a film being made this soon. It runs 133 minutes. Good for: reconstructions of real events, procedural tension, and a portrait of a city rather than a single hero. Less good for: the bombing and its injuries are shown plainly. The patriotic register of the closing stretch, and the invented hero at its centre, will not sit well with everyone.