How many Americans actually realise that Team America: World Police was satire? Act Of Valor, directed by Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh, may as well have been called America: Fuck Yeah! for its simplistic, jingoistic attitude to combat. Casting real SEALS for the acting parts, Act Of Valour (out of spite, we have decided to de-Americanise the spelling) boasts some impressive action sequences as the SEALS embark on numerous garden variety missions. But the caricatured villains, excruciatingly stilted dialogue and lack of any insight, irony or intelligence reduce this film to an extended US army recruitment video and a gamer’s wet dream.
Everything, from the frequent point-of-view sequences to the large, blocked subtitles that couldn’t look more like video-game dialogue if they appeared on screen letter by letter, appears a desperate attempt to evoke a living game of Call Of Duty. And while it was an interesting idea to make the film more authentic by casting real-life Navy SEALS, this could surely have been achieved by allowing the SEALS to perform the stunts while hiring actual actors for the limited dialogue parts. In practise, the SEALS’ wooden performances are about as natural and emotive as the instruction-laden video-game characters at the start of Time Crisis – a fact not helped by the constant use of graphics to provide information on not only the locations but the characters, possibly because neither the scriptwriters or “actors” were capable of subtler development.
While war movie lovers and gamers may appreciate the visceral close-quarters shots and incredible sound design (made even more impressive by the relatively tiny $12 million budget), the desire to pay tribute to the SEALS through reality is misled. Action movies – and importantly, action stars – are too good at involving audiences in the action and emotion of their characters for amateurs to compete. McCoy and Waugh’s intentions may have been noble and their methods uncompromising, but valour doesn’t always result in admirable actions or justifiable results.