Patriots' Day (2016) * *

Directed by:  Peter Berg

Starring:  Mark Wahlberg, John Goodman, Kevin Bacon, Michelle Monaghan, J.K. Simmons, Alex Wolff, Melissa Benoist, Themo Melikidze, Michael Beach

Patriots' Day, like Oliver Stone's World Trade Center (2006), begins with the dawn of a seemingly ordinary day in which people will soon have their lives forever altered by terrible events occurring a few short hours later.     Patriots' Day is the story of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings, their aftermath, and the subsequent investigation and manhunt for the suspects.     We have a gripping story here which Patriots' Day never fully exploits for its strengths.     It is never as wound up as it should be; instead it is content to go off on tangents which distract from the movie's core.    It starts, sputters, and starts again, while never fully connecting emotionally as it should.  

The biggest issue with Patriots' Day is Mark Wahlberg's character, a Boston cop named Tommy Saunders who turns out to be fictional.     Why do we need a fictional person gumming up the works when there are plenty of real people we can focus on?     Director Peter Berg and Wahlberg team up for the third time with Patriots' Day, which is, like Lone Survivor (2013) and Deepwater Horizon (2016), based on a true story.     But Saunders isn't a real person, so why center the movie around his point of view?    The movie struggles to contrive various ways to shoehorn Saunders into the middle of each crucial development.     The FBI needs a "guy who knows the area" of where the bombing took place, so they call on Saunders and no one else.     The suspects carjack a vehicle and kidnap its owner and escapes (which led to a big break in the case) and who happens to be patrolling the area and respond first to the 911 call?   Tommy Saunders.    Minutes later, when the suspects are involved in a shootout with Watertown, Mass. police, who happens upon the scene but Tommy Saunders?    And who determines first that this was indeed a bombing?   Tommy Saunders.   He isn't a person; he is the movie's Forrest Gump.

Oh, did I also mention Saunders is saddled with a bum knee (which requires him to have his wife bring a "fatter brace" to the marathon finish line and thus place her in the middle of action too)?    He also has a backstory in which he is working his way out of the Boston PD doghouse, and working the finish line (which he feels is beneath him) is the last step in his penance.     Patriots' Day tries mightily to give Wahlberg stuff to do, at the expense of the real people who were directly involved in the event.     Since he is fictional anyway, why saddle him with all of this baggage? 

The movie works best when it focuses on the chaos of the bombing and its chilling, confusing aftermath.    The FBI investigation is led by Richard Deslausiers (Bacon), who sets up shop quickly in an abandoned warehouse and is at odds with police commissioner Ed Davis (Goodman) and Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick (Beach) as to how to proceed when crucial information is revealed.    Finding the bombers while viewing countless surveillance videos and sifting through evidence is akin to finding a needle in a stack of needles.   Deslausiers doesn't want to tip his hand and scare the Muslim suspects into hiding.    He doesn't want to be wrong and accuse two Muslims of the crime and have to face media backlash with profiling accusations.     Bacon and Goodman are more than up to the task of presenting us with competent lawmen who have to carefully weigh their options and not blow their case wide open.

Wahlberg brings his everyman quality to the role of Saunders, but the movie becomes too much of a star vehicle for him.    The movie bends and contorts to accommodate him, while shortchanging other people such as the victims and the investigators.     When the payoffs involving the victims arrive, it lacks the emotional oomph that it should have.     The movie wisely does spend time fleshing out the motives of the Tsaranev brothers, who committed the heinous acts, but were surely incompetent criminals who may as well have left a trail of bread crumbs to their location.     There is an interesting dynamic between the brothers.    The older Tamerlan (Melikdze) takes his cause with deadly seriousness.     The younger Dzokhar (Wolff) treats the whole thing like he is playing a real-life version of Grand Theft Auto, which only adds to his callousness.     He is constantly begging his older brother to "give him a gun".    To Dzokhar, this is all a big game.

We know how everything turns out, but the movie doesn't generate the suspense like better movies based on a crisis (Apollo 13 is a prime example).     A strong film based on a well-known story knows that we know how the events unfold, but still keeps us captivated.     Patriots' Day never fully keeps us involved, which is a shame because all of the ingredients of a gripping film are here.     We just don't wind up with one.