- Critic Score
- Most active
- Publication
- Most clicked
-
75Peculiarly entertaining exercise in bare-bones, Hollywood-style action heroism.
-
Feb 27, 201267When the bullets are flying, Act of Valor is undeniably tense and thrilling.
-
67If all you care about is bang-bang, then Act of Valor should satisfy you. But if all you care about is bang-bang, then you're invalidating the very reason the actual SEALS appear in this film: to put a human face on their dangerous work.
-
63Employing Navy troops as stars is a clever idea for an action thriller. But the soldiers' awkward line readings are glaring enough to distract from the potency of the story.
-
63Act of Valor is a competently directed action movie, but forcing the audience to wear such narrow goggles is a dereliction of duty.
-
63Act of Valor is gift-wrapped in patriotism. It was once intended as a recruitment film, and that's how it plays.
-
63The best I can say is that I was never bored, although I was never overwhelmed, either. There are enough small things to keep it interesting even when many of the big things fail.
-
Feb 24, 201260In the movie's best moment, an American sniper takes out a bad guy by a pier while a pair of hands reaches out of the water to grab the body so it doesn't make a splash and alert the other baddies.
-
60Although the film has its undeniably immersive, convincing moments, the merging of dramatic re-creations and on-camera "performances" proves less seamlessly executed than those masterfully coordinated land, sea and air missions.
-
60It would benefit greatly from having real actors in the major roles. That the bad guys -- who are actors -- are more charismatic is certainly not due to the fact that we are on their side. It's because they know how to make us want to watch.
-
58The bad guys, who specialize in funny beards, funny accents, and shaved heads, would feel right at home in an "Austin Powers" movie.
-
58Act of Valor will likely earn high praise from combat veterans and their families, the way movies like "Fireproof" and "Seven Days in Utopia" resonate with Christians. Civilians, movie critics and certainly pacifists won't be nearly as impressed.
-
Feb 24, 201250The exercises are genuine, and so is the hardware. But the script undermines the sense of authenticity at every turn.
-
50Refreshing as it is to see the military portrayed as something other than a band of neurotics and creeps, there's a reason this brand of rah-rah and bang-bang didn't outlast the age of Whitesnake and Marty McFly.
-
50A recruitment poster loosely disguised as a movie.
-
50For what it is, it's well done, well filmed, well outfitted with ordnance and, well, exciting. However, in script, characters and plot, Act of Valor offers only the barest minimum.
-
50This intriguing hybrid is dramatically involving only when the shooting - with real bullets, naturally - gets underway.
-
50The action beats come straight out of the video game "Call of Duty." And when you have real SEALs placed in a picture that lives and dies on the same old first-person-shooter aesthetic, you have a film divided against itself.
-
50The villains come across as individuals rather more compellingly than do the film's ostensible heroes, mostly mouthpieces for warrior credo recited in voiceover.
-
Mar 16, 201240This voiceover is one of many perplexing elements in this ridiculously pumped-up military recruitment video, which intersperses brilliant and immersive combat scenes with excruciating comradely banter.
-
40Despite the weak performances and the scattershot screenplay, the film is visually terrific.
-
40Like all advertisements, this scripted movie is a perfect fantasy: expertly coordinated, simplistic (the bad guys like yachts and bikini girls while our heroes have loving families) and more than a little scary.
-
Feb 24, 201240Shows remarkable access to military materials and personnel but, as a film, is unremarkable every other way.
-
40A mechanically efficient yet soulless dramatization of the U.S. Navy SEALs in action, Act of Valor ultimately misses its target: The hearts and minds of American audiences.
-
40This archipelago of maneuvers, however jaw-dropping, never coheres into a real movie.
-
38The problem is that these stoic warriors infect Act of Valor with more wooden acting than you'd see at a ventriloquism school.
-
35The plot might be summed up this way: America's having a war, and everybody's invited!
-
30By our count, three of the core SEALs are maimed or dead by the end. A new baby is left without her loving father. The picture ends not with a parade but with a funeral. And that may be the toughest, most lasting image in this cockamamie, Pentagon-approved war adventure.
-
25I don't know what to make of Act of Valor. It's like reviewing a recruiting poster.
-
25It's thin material, to say the least, and manipulative to boot, putting women, children, and a SEAL father-to-be in jeopardy in ways more about servicing cheap thrills than any larger point about the perilous state of the world in 2012.
-
20The gimmick behind this excruciating propagandist movie about the US special forces' war on terror is that it features not actors but actual Navy Seals.
-
20Another reason to avoid films endorsed by the US military, this is sub-propaganda tosh that inadvertently plays like Hot Shots: Part Trois.
-
20Act of Valor is like watching the wrestlers in dramas produced by the WWE: They're great at what they do, but being in front of the camera isn't part of that.
-
0A movie whose cinematic ineptitude is matched only by its ideological rottenness, Act of Valor features a cast of real-life active-duty Navy SEALS in order to grant the project's us-versus-them geopolitical worldview a sham moral authority.