Sixteen years after U.S. troops landed in Afghanistan, the conflict there might be summed up as a violent holding pattern, or a stalemate we’re still mired in, or — if you squint hard enough — a slow-motion qualified success. But only the producer Jerry Bruckheimer would seek to portray it as a victory decisive enough to be called a triumph of the kick-ass American spirit.
“12 Strong,” one of those rare “serious” Bruckheimer productions, tells the story of the first U.S. soldiers to land in Afghanistan in the days after 9/11: the members of ODA 595, an elite Special Forces unit that was ordered to link up with a local warlord and fight its way, village by village, to the Taliban stronghold of Mazar-i-Sharif (the country’s fourth largest city). There, they would theoretically gut the Taliban’s nexus of power and topple the ability of Afghanistan to serve as a training ground for Al Qaeda troops.
Chris Hemsworth, in thatchy dark hair and a G.I. Joe scruff, speaking in a manly low voice of superstar resolve, plays the team’s captain, Mitch Nelson, who has never been in combat before. Yet he’s the kind of gung-ho volunteer who’s got sharpshooting in his blood. He may not have “killer eyes” (the warlord’s description of Michael Shannon’s Chief Warrant Officer), but he’s got a killer heart. A family man who only recently arranged to become a desk jockey, Nelson, as the movie presents it, gets slapped awake by 9/11 and fights the bureaucracy to win his shot on the ground. As soon as he arrives, he’s a master of everything: the weather patterns, how to map bombing coordinates for the B-52s that are going to blow Taliban-infested villages into the afterlife, and — of course — how to ride into battle on a horse while blasting a machine gun like a badass medieval knight.
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The American soldiers of ODA 595 defeated the Taliban fighters they were up against, scoring an early blow against the forces of Islamic terrorism. Yet the Taliban, the last time anyone checked, hasn’t exactly jumped ship, and the whole issue of what we’ve accomplished in Afghanistan — forcing the enemy, to a degree, to go elsewhere — remains more than a little murky. “12 Strong,” though, builds a hermetic screen around the first three weeks of the conflict, holding it up to the light as if to say, “Don’t believe the nay-sayers! American heroism still rocks!” I believe that American heroism still does, but that doesn’t make “12 Strong” an illuminating, or overly exciting, war film. It’s more like cheerleading with ballistics. On its own terms, the film is watchable enough, but it’s blunt and stolid and under-characterized, and at 130 minutes it plods.
If there’s anything that great war films like “Saving Private Ryan” or “The Hurt Locker” have taught us, it’s that victory in combat doesn’t look like a street-fight action movie set in a wilderness hellhole. But “12 Strong” is a war film that wants you to feel good about the invincibility of American power. The film is built like a grungy combat video game, with each village treated like a new level and the agony of battle taking a backseat to the pounding thrill of force. The villain is a dastardly Taliban commander (Said Taghmaoui) who looks like a ratty guttersnipe Frank Zappa in black rags; he’s introduced executing a woman in front of her two tearful daughters for the crime of reading. That’s not an exaggeration of Taliban cruelty, but the way the film uses this brute to personify evil is at once reductive and uninteresting. (He’s scary, though not as scary as William Fichtner as a shaven-headed colonel who glowers like Gollum. )
That said, “12 Strong” is only mildly demagogic. It salutes the freedom fighters of Afghanistan, building token hints of drama around the relationship between Capt. Nelson and Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum (Navid Negahban), the Northern Alliance warlord he fights alongside but clashes with when it comes to military strategy. The two have something to teach each other, and I kept thinking how much this relationship would have popped in a David Lean film. But the script of “12 Strong,” written by Ted Tally and Peter Craig (adapting the 2009 bestseller “Horse Soldiers”), is pretty bare bones. When the general accuses Capt. Nelson of being a soldier and not a warrior, we’re eager to see Nelson grow into one, but the film barely bothers to demonstrate the difference.
The novelty that’s the chief selling point of “12 Strong” — the fact that the members of ODA 595 rode horses to make it through the treacherous terrain — doesn’t amount to very much; they all seem to know how, and it’s not as if contemporary soldiers on horseback look any more exotic than cowboys and Indians. The film’s most impressive aspect is its arid landscapes. “12 Strong” was shot in New Mexico, with the mountains there doubling for Afghanistan’s famously craggy and forbidding tableaux, and the director, Nicolai Fuglsig, and cinematographer, Rasmus Videbaek, use the locations to conjure what it might look like to wage war in an endless sprawling no-man’s land.
Visually, the terrain comes close to raising an existential question: What, exactly, are we fighting for in Afghanistan? The film slips in the pointed and now rather outdated argument that if the Taliban can be defeated, and Afghanistan eliminated as an Al Qaeda base, then there will be no more attacks like 9/11. Well, there haven’t been…but is that the reason why? “12 Strong” lends a shape of supreme purpose to a conflict that is still in search of one.
Producer Jerry Bruckheimer thinks big, and his war movies can range from noisy idiocy (Pearl Harbor) to near brilliant (Black Hawk Down). Luckily, 12 Strong sees the value in substance as well as spectacle. Based on Doug Stanton's 2009 bestseller, Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story of a Band of U.S. Soldiers Who Rod to Victory in Afghanistan, this rough-hewn drama has a compelling, mostly untold story to relate. After 9/11, an elite Special Forces unit comprised of 12 Green Berets led by Captain Mitch Nelson (Chris Hemsworth), were dropped into Afghanistan in response to the attack. Their mission impossible – codenamed: Task Force Dagger – was to link up with the Northern Alliance, headed by General Abdul Rashid Dostum (Navid Negahban), to take on the Taliban and its Al Qaeda followers. He's show the U.S. team where the enemy was located. Nelson's group would then join in the battle on land and order bomb strikes from the air.
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What seemed simple on paper was, of course, a whole other another thing reality-wise. The captain and his men knew nothing of the Afghan terrain – one dotted T-72 tanks and missile launchers – or had the experience of riding horses, which was the only way to maneuver on this unfamiliar landscape of sand and mountains. Not only did the Americans have to practice diplomacy by cementing a bond with the Northern Alliance, they had to learn to fight Afghan-style to survive. And that saddling up.
It's a hell of a tale, and Danish director Nicolai Fuglsig, a former photojournalist and creator of award-winning TV commercials, had his work cut out for him. It had to look and feel real (the production shot in New Mexico), and the filmmaker certainly delivers. The action scenes pulsate with the hum of modern warfare. Credit Hemsworth for playing Nelson not as some Norse God out of Marvel fantasy (that's his day job) but as a man of courage forced to improvise on his feet or die trying. The rest of the cast also perform beyond the call of escapist duty. Michael Shannon is outstanding as the Chief Warrant Officer, a fighter who has seen combat, unlike his captain. Michael Pena and Trevante Rhodes – so good in the Oscar-winning Moonlight – also score as members of the team.
If you're thinking these characters are drawn in conventional lines by screenwriters Peter Craig and Oscar winner Ted Tally (Silence of the Lambs), you're not wrong. The script doesn't go much beyond the surface in establishing the camaraderie among these men who left their families to take on a battle still being fought. This is not a movie with time on its hands for character development or scrappy discussions of the politics involved on both sides. What 12 Strong does deliver, however, is a rousing tribute to the bravery of soldiers whose contributions went unheralded for years. That impact cannot be denied.
Photo: Warner Bros.
Movie Review Movie Review 12 Strong C+ Movie Review 12 Strong C+ C+ 12 Strong Director Nicolai Fuglsig Runtime 130 minutes Rating R Language English Cast Chris Hemsworth, Michael Shannon, Navid Negahban, Michael Peña, Trevante Rhodes, William Fichtner, Rob Riggle Availability Theaters everywhere January 19
It’s become Hollywood tradition to sound reveille at the start of the year with stories of heroic Navy SEALs, Green Berets, and CIA contractors aimed at putting red-state butts into seats, and close out with a quavering awards-season “Taps” of dutiful acknowledgements that war is, in fact, terrible. And so it goes with the dusty, Jerry Bruckheimer-produced 12 Strong (a title generic enough to be a sports drama), a squarely-in-the-former-category wartime adventure wannabe that turns a real Special Forces operation in Afghanistan into something that feels like warmed-over John Milius.
Adopting a wavering American accent, Chris Hemsworth stars as Mitch Nelson, a captain in the 5th Special Forces Group—the old stomping ground of John Rambo and Col. Kurtz—who leads his team into northern Afghanistan to assist an ethnic Uzbek warlord in the fight against the Taliban just a month after the 9/11 attacks. With only three weeks left before the coming winter freeze, Nelson and his men have their work cut out for them: make contact with the warlord, earn his trust, and help his ragtag militia recapture a village and breach the Tiangi Gap, a narrow ass-crack in the mountains that serves as a supply route from the Taliban stronghold of Mazar-i-Sharif.
Surprisingly stolid and barren for a Bruckheimer production, 12 Strong skates by on the virtues of an old-fashioned programmer: technical competence, an above-average cast, and well-written dialogue, the latter courtesy of screenwriters Ted Tally (The Silence Of The Lambs) and Peter Craig (Blood Father). The director, Nicolai Fuglsig, is a Danish former photojournalist who began his career covering radioactive pollution and the Kosovo War, which may explain the relative restraint. But perhaps it’s best to leave the flag-waving camo fantasies to the true believers. His action scenes are strictly perfunctory, kabooms of gunfire, tossed rubble, flipping trucks, and air strikes executed with the same sense of obligation that characterizes the movie’s Special Forces heroes.
Photo: Warner Bros.
Only three of the men under Nelson’s command leave an impression: Spencer (Michael Shannon), an experienced warrant officer who is relentlessly loyal to his untested, much younger captain; the fidgety but selfless Diller (Michael Peña); and the lollipop-sucking Milo (Moonlight’s Trevante Rhodes), who ends up taking a shine to a bothersome local kid, as American servicemen in movies about war in the Middle East are wont to do. Not that these characters are all that well-developed (though there is a small, effective vignette early in the film with Spencer and his family), but at least the viewer might end up remembering their names. That’s more than can be said for the rest of the group, who are a blur of gear, injuries, orders, and wisecracks.
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One might argue that’s because it’s supposed to be about “the mission.” But what’s the mission about, anyway? For a war film, 12 Strong is short on conflict and adrenaline; it sings the praises of exceptional men, frontline camaraderie, and unlikely odds with all the passion of a grunt following orders. Like most exercises in January jingo, it’s a “true,” “declassified” story, adapted from Doug Stanton’s nonfiction book Horse Soldiers: The Extraordinary Story Of A Band Of US Soldiers Who Rode to Victory In Afghanistan—and like the rest of them, it’s about as real as a G.I. Joe action figure. American Sniper, the best of the lot, ignored Chris Kyle’s fabulism, forfeiting possible insight into the psychology of a self-made culture-wars hero. But at least it tried to depict the consequences of traumatic stress.
At the ill-defined center of 12 Strong is the relationship between Nelson and the film’s most Milius-ian character, Abdul Rashid Dostum (Navid Negahban), the aforementioned Uzbek warlord, portrayed as a figure of almost medieval nobility. As the expected end-titles epilogue helpfully announces, Dostum would later go on to become vice president of Afghanistan, though it fails to mention the fact that he is currently hiding out in Turkey to avoid prosecution for the kidnapping, rape, and torture of a political rival. Good people might find themselves fighting in wars, but they aren’t likely to lead them. 12 Strong, however, contents itself with peddling the same crap about pure valor and warrior ethos that’s been around since wars were actually fought on horseback—and it doesn’t even have the decency to reward viewers a rousing cavalry charge.
Proudly and narrowly, “12 Strong” is a good-news war story, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by first-time feature director Nicolai Fuglsig, of Denmark. He trained as a photojournalist, and covered the war in Kosovo; in the last decade Fuglsig’s commercial resume includes sleek, digitally savvy and action-oriented spots for Corvette and Xbox Halo 4, among other clients.
“12 Strong” is a good-news story, in that the facts and personnel constitute an early victory over the Taliban — not a comprehensive or lasting one, but a victory nonetheless. In the weeks following the destruction of the World Trade Center, as part of the Bush administration’s Operation Enduring Freedom, a 12-man U.S. Army Special Forces task force, code-named Task Force Dagger, was flown and then dropped into northern Afghanistan.
The mission was simple, the process, complicated. The Green Berets were charged with joining and advising Northern Alliance tribal warlords and their troops, fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida. The strategic early battle involved control of the city of Mazar-i-Sharif. With U.S. Air Force bombing support, and American soldiers traversing some extremely treacherous mountain terrain on horseback en route, the results were decisive. Also, the optics were terrific. The movie includes the moment when then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld held up the picture of the “horse soldiers” (this was in late 2001) and found them very useful in selling the early stages of the war in Afghanistan.
In 2009, producer Bruckheimer got ahold of the galleys of Doug Stanton’s nonfiction account “Horse Soldiers.” It took a while, but “12 Strong” has come to fruition, with New Mexico locales doubling for Afghan and Uzbek locations. The movie was made on a medium-range budget (in other words, it isn’t “Black Hawk Down,” in any respect). “12 Strong” follows the production blueprint established by the gripping 2013 film “Lone Survivor,” which depicted a no-win 2005 Navy SEAL operation against the Taliban.
The stalwart cast is led by Thor himself, Chris Hemsworth. He plays the group’s captain, here named Mitch Nelson (based loosely on the real-life Mark Nutsch). Michael Shannon, in a shrewdly modulated turn, plays Chief Warrant Officer Hal Spencer, based on Bob Pennington. Trevante Rhodes, Michael Pena, William Fichtner and Rob Riggle work their scenes to advantage, though screenwriters Ted Tally and Peter Craig often seem stranded in a no-man’s land between quasi-documentary reality and reassuring Hollywood cliche.
The key relationship here is between Nelson and Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum of the Northern Alliance, played by Navid Negahban of “Homeland.” The former’s characterization is familiar, stripped of detail and, as written and depicted here, Our American Hero, period. Dostum, by contrast, is the most interesting element of “12 Strong,” which probably should’ve added up in its title to 13. Scenes that seem far-fetched, such as Dostum goading the Taliban forces by telephone moments before an air strike, actually happened. For the script’s purposes, however, Dostum is there to remind Nelson that he can be more than a soldier; if he fights from the heart, he will become the warrior this war needs to vanquish their common foe.
Much of the action, as shot by Fuglsig and cinematographer Rasmus Videbaek and edited by Lisa Lassek, favors clear, adrenaline-pumping action beats and rousing, against-all-odds triumphs. Throughout the film, we’re reminded of the peculiarity of fighting men on horseback going up against all manner of military hardware. It’s not a bad movie, as far as it goes. In terms of context, though, it goes virtually nowhere. Granted, “Lone Survivor” stayed similarly close to a specific mission, albeit one with a very different outcome. But that movie stuck with you, relaying a stronger, truer sense of desperation. “12 Strong” is a straight-up, unalloyed shot of movie patriotism for the Make America Great Again sector of the American movie audience.
As proven by, among others, “American Sniper,” that sector is huge. “12 Strong” producer Bruckheimer also financed “Black Hawk Down,” a film that made war feel and look viscerally exciting, even at its bloodiest, but never lost sight of the larger picture and the ultimate cost of armed conflict. While director Fuglsig trained as a photojournalist, his movie’s action style owes as much to gaming aesthetics as it does to the real world. That cheapens the real-life heroism. And the disinterest in what came afterward feels suspicious. Once the Bush administration thought Afghanistan was good to go, the fiasco in Iraq began. Recent, varying estimates put the Taliban’s influence or control of Afghan districts at anywhere from 14 to 45 percent of the country. Meantime, U.S. spending in Afghanistan is nearing the trillion-dollar mark; some experts put the figure over $2 trillion.
No war movie can tell more than one primary story and a few underneath that one. “12 Strong” sticks to the basics, without much interest in the differentiating specifics of the men involved, or anything on a geopolitical scale beyond the impulse these Special Forces veterans shared in the wake of 9/11. It seems to me a qualified, limited success.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
mjphillips@chicagotribune.com
Twitter @phillipstribune
'12 Strong' -- 2.5 stars
MPAA rating: R (for war violence and language throughout)
Running time: 2:09
Opens: Thursday evening
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