The Benghazi movie is bombing. Might have done better if they stuck with the working title: Hitlery's Fault
— Bob Schooley (@Rschooley) January 17, 2016
Michael Bay's "13 Hours" is punishingly paced, flimsily constructed, and tackily executed https://t.co/twyD5G4Wm0 pic.twitter.com/HS3btXo5Rw
— Flavorwire (@flavorwire) January 15, 2016
From that Flavorwire article:
… It’s sort of a perfect storm of moneymaking elements, a dramatization of an international incident that remains particularly interesting to the segment of the movie-going audience that’s made big hits out of war movies for the past three consecutive Januarys (American Sniper, Lone Survivor, Zero Dark Thirty). But those films went “wide” in January after Oscar-qualifying runs the previous month; no one bothered to take that step for 13 Hours, which takes the complexities of those films and burns them off like fat in the Foreman grill of director Bay’s shiny flag-waving. (13 Hours is as clumsily imitative of those films as his Pearl Harbor was of Titanic, and about as dire a sit.)
…[L]et’s ignore the obvious red and blue elements, let’s bypass the obvious digs at Obama and Clinton and the like, let’s take Bay’s word that his film “doesn’t get political at all” and that he only aims to tell this story and honor these men. Even taken purely on those terms, it’s still garbage – punishingly paced, flimsily constructed, tackily executed with the subtlety and panache of a third-rate 1930s melodrama…
And all the sad pianos and teary-eyed reactions and scorched family portraits floating through the debris like the feather in Forrest Gump merely serve to underscore the fact that Bay took that moment, and he cheapened it into whiz-bang “Bayhem.” In the Wall Street Journal, Mark Geist, one of the men at the center of the story, says, “I told Michael, if you do anything that disrespects the four Americans that died, I will beat the shit out of you.” Well, the filmmaker’s got an ass-kicking coming. Because at the end of the day, he took these brave men, and he plugged them into a goddamn video game. Fuck Michael Bay, and fuck his bullshit movie.
The Washington Post‘s film critic, on “‘13 Hours,’ Benghazi and the slippery definition of ‘political’”:
In a juxtaposition so perverse that it could only have been dreamt up in Hollywood, the holiday designated to celebrate the life of Martin Luther King Jr. — America’s most prominent practitioner of nonviolence — has become the go-to weekend for war movies.