Patriots Day Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		5.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.5

Patriots Day Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman March 24, 2017

As I watched Patriots Day two days ago in preparation for writing this review, the news was filled with yet another terrorist attack claiming the lives of innocent bystanders, and one might be tempted to say the world was reeling from the assault—but was it? I was actually a little shocked to see some (what was to my eyes and ears) almost cavalier coverage of the attack on various cable news outlets, where the “breaking news” was in fact broken away from regularly to cover other, more mundane, stories. It was as if some sort of collective acknowedgement that we’ve all been down this road far too many times before had been reached, and that the typical 24/7 approach to incidents like the one that unfolded in London on March 22 didn’t need to be followed. Of course, while ostensibly international, most of the cable news outfits on American television are obviously based in the United States, so there may be a sort of weird jingoism involved, where if it’s “not in my backyard”, it doesn’t deserve the sort of hyperbolic coverage domestic attacks typically engender, except that that would ignore the appropriately amped up coverage that attacks in Paris and Nice received over the past couple of years. For those who want to “relive” one of the more horrifying attacks the United States has suffered, Patriots Day recreates the drama surrounding the bombing at the Boston Marathon in 2013. It’s a somewhat odd amalgamation of fictionalized and real life elements, something that may sit a bit uneasily with some viewers who want dramas focused on such a provocative subject to offer “the facts, and only the facts”. But the film has a number of viscerally compelling performances, and it does help to elucidate at least a little bit of the relationship between the Tsarnaev brothers, the siblings who wreaked havoc on what should have been a celebratory finish line.

Tommy Saunders (Mark Wahlberg) is a Boston police sergeant who has some “personal issues” which become evident in the film’s opening scene (unrelated to the Marathon), where his shaded past is mentioned by some beat cops as well as Commissioner Ed Davis (John Goodman), who shows up at the locale of a “collar” to inform Saunders that if Saunders “behaves” at the Marathon the next day, his record will be expunged and he’ll be back in good graces. While this gives a supposed personal focus to the film, it may strike some as needlessly manipulative, positing a fictional character whose own life story is somehow going to intersect with a real life event, supposedly leading to some kind of catharsis.

Two real life (survivor) victims of the attack are also introduced, young couple Jessica Kensky (Rachel Brosnahan) and Patrick Downes (Christopher O’Shea), documenting their domestic tranquility which will soon of course be viciously interrupted. This is another element which is an understandable focus of the screenplay (by director Peter Berg, Matt Cook and Joshua Zetumer), since it puts a “human” face on the tragedy, but, again, the set up seems both a bit rote and (considering the horrifying injures the pair suffers) unavoidably manipulative feeling. Perhaps more effective are the vignettes showing the scheming of Tamerlan Tsarnaev (Themo Melikidze), who has an almost Svengali like power over his younger brother Dzhokhar (Alex Wolff), a kid who (in this formulation, at least) seems to have been more easily assimilated into American culture than Tamerlan, and who is shown to have at least some passing misgivings about Tamerlan’s plot to bomb the Marathon.

With the “introductions” out of the way, the film gets to the actual Marathon and details the chaos that ensued after the bombs went off. Saunders is of course front and center on the finish line, but in the wake of the carnage (which is shown in all its bloody “glory”), he’s soon joined by a coterie of other investigators, including FBI Agent Richard DesLauriers (Kevin Bacon) and, later, Watertown police sergeant Jeffrey Pugliese (J.K. Simmons). It’s in this more “procedural” section that the film really begins to build both some narrative momentum, as well as some perhaps surprising suspense (given that most folks are going to know how the story ends). That suspense element ports over into the Tsarnaev angle, especially once the brothers realize they’ve been identified relatively early in the proceedings and become desperate to escape the clutches of justice.

It’s the whole Tsarnaev angle where Patriots Day probably provides its highest levels of angst, even though the broad outlines of the story are of course already known. In fact one of the most harrowing sequences in the film is the brothers’ carjacking of Dun Meng (Jimmy O. Yang), a brazen act in and of itself which then leads to further calamity. While vignettes like the Tsarnaevs’ execution of a cop (something that gives them the weapon to carjack Meng) are riveting and inherently disturbing, the whole “up close and personal” angle of the brothers more or less kidnapping Meng and then forcing him to help them is in some ways more viscerally compelling, since it pits a seemingly helpless “everyman” against two very dangerous criminals.

All of this tends to beg the question as to what exactly Patriots Day’s “message” is supposed to be. Deepwater Horizon, the near simultaneous collaboration between Wahlberg and director Peter Berg, at least had the subtext of environmentalism propelling the plot, but what is Patriots Day trying to say? Terrorism is bad? The resiliency of the human spirit is indomitable? That's fine, but then why not just make a documentary? “Boston Strong” resonates through Patriots Day in an unavoidable (and indeed commendable) way, but the addition of fictionalized characters, while understandable, to my mind detracts or at least deflects from the real life heroes of the incident, both victims and the police investigating the mayhem. In fact, for all of Patriots Day’s picayune detailing of how everything unfolded, some viewers may find the purest emotion in the film comes at the end, when several real life participants (including many who are “characters” in the film) provide brief interview segments documenting their experiences both on the day of the attack and afterward. Sometimes the truth is, if not stranger, more powerful than fiction.

Patriots Day Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Patriots Day is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.40:1. Digitally captured with Arri Alexa XT cameras, though I haven't been able to track down whether this was finished at 2K or 4K DI (my hunch is 2K, since the raw capture resolution was 3.4K according to the IMDb, though if someone has authoritative information, pass it along and I'll update the review). This is a generally sharp and appealing presentation, with excellent sharpness and fine detail levels when lighting conditions allow. As tends to be the case with some digitally shot films, the nighttime material has a bit of murkiness which tends to mask fine detail levels at time. Refreshingly, the film hasn't been aggressively color graded, and while not overly vivid, the palette looks natural, albeit gruesome at times (there's a tendency to focus on horrifying wounds, especially those to legs). Berg and DP Tobias Schleissler favor a kind of verité approach that frequently includes handheld work, so there's quite a bit of "jiggly cam". Also, as can clearly be seen in several of the screenshots accompanying this review, framings often feature blurry foreground objects in the corner of the frame (often intruding into territory far beyond the corner), with the actual focal subject (literally and figuratively) toward the back. Both the handheld elements and this directorial choice tend to tamp down sharpness and detail levels at times. There's recurrent use of archival video scattered throughout the film, and that understandably looks fairly ragged when compared to the bulk of the presentation (see screenshot 19).

Patriots Day Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Patriots Day features an extremely effective DTS:X mix that offers a glut of spatial placements of various sound effects that are often almost disturbingly lifelike. Kind of interestingly, at least some of the depiction of the initial bomb blasts are from a slight distance, and so the power of the explosions are strangely muted, though it feels lifelike in the context of where the camera is placed (some other "up close and personal" vignettes offer much more sonic energy). But while these expected moments of audio focus provide ample surround energy, there are other, less obvious, uses of the surround channels which include everything from the whirling of police and broadcast helicopters to the chaos as patients are brought into hospitals. The mix is a bit chaotic at times, as might be expected, but prioritization is always well handled. The pulsing score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is also effectively splayed through the surrounds.

Patriots Day Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• The Boston Strong: Stories of Courage (1080p; 21:34) is branded as Boston Strong: True Stories of Courage on the main menu and includes profiles of and interviews with Dr. Jeffrey Kalish, Dun Meng, and Sgt. Jeff Pugliese. This is pretty much exactly what I was talking about above, with a documentarian approach providing at least as much emotional impact, and arguably more so, than any dramatization could.


• The Boston Bond: Recounting the Tale (1080p; 21:43) has a bit more of an EPK flavor, but includes interviews and an homage of sorts to both Boston in general and the interactions of the cast and crew with the city when they were shooting there.


• The Real Patriots: The Local Heroes' Stories (1080p; 19:48) offers Peter Berg describing what kind of movie he likes to make, followed by some excellent interviews with various participants that are sometimes perhaps ineffectively interrupted by snippets from the film.


• The Cast Remembers (1080p; 5:51) presents several cast detailing what they were doing when the Marathon Bombing happened.


• Actors Meet Their Real Life Counterparts: A 2 Part Series (1080p; 18:13) offers interchanges between John Goodman and Ed Davis, and Jimmy O. Yang and Dun Meng.


• Researching the Day (1080p; 11:22) is another quasi EPK with interviews detailing the production both in general terms and also more specifically in accurately recreating events.

Patriots Day Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

They say that timing is everything, and I've been thinking a lot over the past couple of days why I found Patriots Day a bit disturbing, and not just courtesy of the story it tells. Perhaps because I was also wrapped up in the drama in London (where I have a lot of family and friends), I kept wondering "why make a movie about this tragedy?", and also couldn't shake the fact that for whatever reason I found the documentarian aspects of both the feature film (as in the closing interview sequence with the real life victims and participants) and the supplements on this Blu-ray more emotionally charged and therefore resonant than some of the fictionalized elements in the film. One way or the other, Patriots Day is well made and provides some fascinating detail on the background of some of the characters. Whether you personally feel the need to relive these events is of course a personal decision, but in a way it was the supplementary material on this disc that conveyed both the horror and heroism of this incident more than the dramatization. With all of this said, Patriots Day has superb technical merits and a good slate of bonus material and comes Highly recommended.