It’s like Call of Duty, but only better and on the big screen that’s not in your living room. Real life Navy Seals make this a movie experience that you won’t soon forget. Act of Valor will undoubtedly make even the most diehard hippy want to enlist by films end. The combat scenes are extremely “in-your-face” and hardnosed, heck if they were any more real you would need to go to basic training to even set foot in the theater.
The “movie” features scenarios of hostage extraction (Roselyn Sanchez is surprisingly convincing at this role), suicide bombers, and mentally unstable billionaires turned terrorists. As far as the acting goes these guys did pretty well for a cast full of newbies, though don’t expect to see them on the carpet for the 85th Annual “Let’s give it to Meryl” Academy Awards. At times the film comes off as every bit the recruitment film that it was intended to be (expect every cliché in the book thrown at you), but it managed to keep its grittiness and sense of never-ending danger that Seals experience on a moment-to-moment basis.
You’ll leave the theater with a new sense of how meaningless your job is and how important theirs is. It was like humble pie with a popcorn chaser. Action, pseudo-drama, some rigid dialog, and some uncomfortably real situations all are a part of this box office topper. Are there some pitfalls to a Navy Seal movie? Yes. But it is still a more than solid film with an incredibly unfeigned message: They protect us from situations we couldn’t possibly imagine. Never forget that.