It is easy to imagine an alternative universe in which there is an exciting film entitled Bowling Green, directed by Michael Bay. Ralph Fiennes gets to play a chuckling terrorist who detonates the gigantic bomb in Bowling Green, Kentucky in 2011, and then Peter Sarsgaard and Meryl Streep play the liberal media nabobs who conspire with the Obama White House to cover it up, getting amnesia pills in the water supply, pulping newspapers, changing websites. Mark Wahlberg, Stephen Baldwin and Scott Baio play three US Navy Seals whose wives were killed in the Bowling Green massacre; they accept a top secret terminate-with-extreme-prejudice mission – ’copter out to Kreplachistan where Fiennes is holed up in the Swedish embassy, having spent the host country’s entire UN aid budget on a state-of-the-art broadband connection for his internet p*rn.
Of course it is in bad taste to imply some kind of rhetorical equivalence between this notoriously non-existent outrage and the subject of this film: the very real Boston marathon bombings of 2013, which killed three people, and injured hundreds more. But it was an equivalence invented by President Trump’s aide Kellyanne Conway who chose to insult the victims of actual terrorist outrages by attempting in the course of an interview to invent “the Bowling Green massacre” supposedly ignored by the press.
At any rate, this true-life film, directed and co-written by Peter Berg, is a tense thriller about the 2013 Boston bombings that ends on a piercing note of celebratory survival. There are some good action sequences. It features actors playing the real-life figures involved, including the two Chechen-born perpetrators themselves, Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Themo Melikidze) and Dzokhar Tsarnaev (Alex Wolff). But it invents an all-round good guy Bahhhston cop, Sgt Tommy Saunders, played in full Mark Wahlberg mode by Mark Wahlberg, with the Mark-Wahlbergian stolidity that is great in comedies but a bit trying here. He is the very epitome of “Boston Strong”, four-square behind the principle that fighting terrorism is a matter of good versus evil. Er, didn’t the British government try telling Boston that in the 70s and 80s?
Saunders is positioned at the finish line on that terrible day, having been briefly suspended for some unspecified misdemeanour, and so in line for redemption in the traditional manner. He is infuriated by two idiotic junior officers who now equal him in rank, and barks at them: “Life is a rigged f*ckin’ game and you two just passed go.” Well, it may well be rigged in that proto-Trumpian sense, but that doesn’t stop Tommy getting important access to the bombing investigation and winning high praise for his important part in it. He is a kind of fictional conglomerate, representing the street-level police work and the citywide solidarity that helped pinch the terrorists. Incidentally, this film doesn’t scruple to flash up a picture of the real-life unconvicted wife of one of the terrorists over the closing credits.
At various points, the film makes the top brass briefly consider the namby-pamby civil rights considerations before naturally dismissing them. JK Simmons, playing an older police chief, actually winds up by gasping that he really has to quit smoking – in high Airplane! style.
The central shootout itself is well put together: a chaotic standoff between the police and the Tsarnaev brothers in their stolen car, armed with guns and IEDs (improvised explosive devices). And, intentionally or not, the movie does show the sheer stupidity of the terrorists, a stupidity and naivety that is a weird component of their cunning. They have an easily traceable connection to college kids through drug-dealing activities; they decline to leave the city; they wind up announcing themselves to a witness; and they entertain bizarre fantasies of making it to New York to carry out more bombings.
Chris Morris’s Four Lions also made the terrorists stupid, though in a more emphatic way. But the point is that their stupidity is not simply a design flaw in their plan’s workability. It is an important part of their reckless and fanatical need to do the bombing in the first place. The lack of imagination and intelligence, the failure to see what it would do to the victims and perpetrators, is the rocket fuel that the jihadis need. The strong narrative pulse overrides the irritation of Wahlberg’s blue-collar alpha-saint.
