Part of the problem with firefight films is keeping the dudes straight. Wait, am I trying to say that soldiers under hostile conditions favor homosexuality? I should really word that more carefully. Well, I dunno about that first part; I do know it’s often difficult to tell whom-is-whom when war action is happening on screen. Lone Survivor pitted just four Navy Seals (Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, Ben Foster) against an Afghani horde and I still had trouble telling the four apart. Did that detract from my enjoyment? Not one little bit.
After some preliminary background to show what tough muthers and tough bruthers SEALS are, we get down to business. Admittedly, the first half hour amounts to little more than a pissing contest where the object is to pee exactly like the man next to you forever without end. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before. Finally, we get an objective: the four Seals mentioned above are to take out some Al Qaeda personnel in a wooded area of Afghanistan that looks like greater Lake Tahoe.
The mission goes well for about ten minutes of screen time, then Marky Mark and the boys discover the enemy has greater numbers than intel suggested. We get some brutal footage of what the local warlords do to enemies. Yes, we know this is foreshadowing. The four slide in neatly beneath the tree line and hang out in a wooded area in the hills well beyond the, for lack of a better term, residential area. This ain’t good enough. Given the numbers, the Americans have to get closer. This goes well until a trio of goat-herders stumble upon the soldiers. And then we have one of the classic choices in cinema history: kill the goat-herders and continue the mission or let them go (leaving them without the ability to return before nightfall in this wilderness is the equivalence of a death sentence, so you can’t just tie them all up and leave them there) and scrap the mission. The problem with the latter is the speed at which freed Afghanis can get word back to the warlords. The failure to account properly for the goat-herder express back to the village equals death and everybody knows it – the Seals, Al Qaeda, the audience, the goats, everybody.
There must be, literally, at least two dozen solutions to the problem “how do you keep a boy, a young man and a grandpa from moving quickly in the wrong direction without permanently harming them?” Huh, off the top my head – you make them walk with you back up the mountain; you wait for the rescue plane; you leave them there when it arrives … You tie them all together … You tie them all together and then to something very heavy, but movable, like a dead tree branch … You make each one climb a different tree and tie the two younger ones up high in their own trees … You knock them out … You make them into a human centipede … You make them watch Human Centipede (anybody who can think of anything else after watching that film is freaking 
inhuman) … seriously, did you even consider this problem ? … Maybe give it three seconds of thought? It’s ok, I mean, it’s just YOUR LIVES ON THE LINE! Oh, Navy Seals, you kick ass, but when will you learn to take names?
You know this is based on a real-life account, yes?
The ensuing attack is the slam dunk contest of this particular piece. The prelim amounts to little more than fans waiting for the slam dunk contest to happen. Unforgiving, bloody and ulcer-level intense, this is the best gunfight footage since Saving Private Ryan. The Seals prove harder to finish off than Boromir in Fellowship of the Ring. If Lone Survivor weren’t so well shot, it would be hilarious. Every ten minutes, the four group together, each worse than when we last met him, and give one another a “you good?” “You good?” “Ok, let’s go!” Ten minutes later, somebody’s missing an ear, somebody’s down several fingers, somebody’s carrying around his large intestine and the fourth is holding his own brain. “You good?” “You good?” “Ok, let’s go!”
There are three separate, unpadded wounded-soldier, boulder-landing mini-cliff dives, each one more painful than the last, in Lone Survivor. This form of bouldering is extremely tough to watch from an empathetic POV. And yet, it’s magnificent as well — these are some tough muthers. If you can stomach the ugly, it’s all worth it.
It’s butt kicking time in Afghani wood
The trigger is cocked; a question of should.
Know this: you’re here to offer nothing but good
Even if it means you’ll all die, understood?
Rated R, 121 Minutes
D: Peter Berg Wait. The guy who directed Battleship?! No f***ing way!
W: Peter Berg
Genre: F*** you, Al Qaeda!
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Soldiers
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Pacifists
