I don’t get the fuss about Lone Survivor. It’s at best an okay horror film. It’s got a classic set-up, of the super tougher than tough army guys, armed to the hilt with gear, and not a small amount testosterone-y – kind of bland and dickish at the same time. Who better to get their comeuppance?

And there’s the tortureporn trope that they let their hostages go instead of killing them. I get it: we live an amoral world, and moral choices must be punished. And I could even forgive the soldiers letting the hostages go at the bottom of the mountain instead of just leading them farther away so they wouldn’t warn the villagers. I know you got to have a set-up, however idiotic. That’s horror for you.

But the characters got to have some intelligence to keep us rooting for them. Maybe I could forgive a military guy not knowing about a false ridge. But don’t show him with the map. And, after screwing this up, and after the opening how the SEALs have to stay up all night in cold water or flunk out, that they can keep going for days without sleep. You can’t, after all that, show them going back down the hill to take a nap.

Quiz Show. Now that was a horror film.

And what’s with the hundreds of guys attacking? I mean it’s a horror film, so no problem with credulity. But it’s a horror film. What you want is a lone Jason type, or, in this case, a lone wronged forest kid. He could take out these idiots with a feather, three matches and a half-full canteen of sand. I made him older than six so we didn’t lose believability.

Plus it’s called Lone Survivor. What a terrible title. A good horror movie is all about whether or not the last guy gets it in the last second. By showing Mr. Mark Wahlberg in cardiac arrest at the beginning of the film, they somehow make it clear that he’s going to survive by showing that’s he’s dying. Unless you don’t know the title. Which, given the number of wanderers from Frozen or Wolf of Wall Street, is fair enough.

As per horror’s desire to see bodies taking punishment, there’s bone crushing falls. That’s kinda new I guess. But if you’re going to be a gritty real horror film, you can’t have rocket launchers land next to you – a lot – and not be slightly injured.

They did jump off a rock in slow motion, so I guess I can let it pass.

Now you might say that it’s not a horror film. But it can be two things at once. With Return of the Living Dead, Part III we know that it’s possible to be both a horror film and a quasi-experimental feminist commentary film on military intervention.

For future reference, I like my quasi-experimental feminist commentary films on military intervention to be a bit less realistic. I mean, it makes the implication that outrageous racism, military incompetence masquerading as patriotism and the prolonged and unspeakably violent war in Afghanistan to save one guy is fine, as long as it’s real. Such a position makes it both impossible to criticize and deeply deserving of that criticism. No one would go that far.

That would be despicable.