ACT OF VALOR

This is a recruiting film, and I am not going to say anything bad about it, because there are real Navy SEALS aboard, and I have no desire to be disrespectful in even a small mocking way about them and their inability to act.

Your comment, “Well, they’re not actors, are they? Why would you expect great acting?” is on point, but sort of funny, since, it’s a movie, so actors should be hired.

It would be a great idea to actually recruit actors for these MOSs, so your kid can please himself and you at the same time: he can follow his acting bliss while at the same time making you proud that he’s a soldier. He gets his military ID and his SAG card on the same day. In post-DADT, this has great possibilities. Lindsay Lohan could enlist in time to make the next movie, and that’s a good idea, because she probably needs the health insurance.

C’mon, all the services have bands and choirs, so why not troop troupes?

Don’t blame me for pointing out the lack of acting ability. If you hire non-actors, it goes without saying that they won’t be any good. If you hire me as your caterer, for instance…

Writers should also be hired, but we’ll let that part go. If you don’t have actors, what is the use of a good script? It’s going to be wasted.

The movie will do well, I’m sure. It’s full of go-American explosions, lots of flag waving, flag folding, flag-handing-to-widows (the poor mother sits unnoticed as if her heart has not been taken out whole and wrung dry). There is endless ooh-rah-ing, last minute rescues, last-moment captures, last-instant escapes.

It starts in Indonesia, moves to Ukraine, Costa Rica, Mexico. In most of these places the American Navy moves around at will, doing all sorts of damage, including a night-time destruction of a village full of families. It’s a tiny village in the middle of nowhere. Why didn’t we just cordon it off and wait until morning, get the kids out, and then blow it sky-high? It made me want to vote for Ron Paul the way we stomp all over the world as if we own it, as if we are responsible for feeding the world, policing the world, providing healthcare for the world, peacekeeping for the world. Oh wait…

The story concerns jihadists who are going to scare us into not spending money—thereby shutting down our economy. I don’t know what jihadists are thinking. Don’t they know that even if a stadium blows up somewhere, so that we are all terrified of leaving our houses, we can still shop online?

Obviously, this movie would have been better had they had good actors. On the other hand, I do think this movie was made as a full-length recruiting video to be shown at ROTC parties, and it just happened to make good. So congrats to them, but next time, they need to keep the Real Navy SEALS in the audience.

It has the desired result of reminding us that we can sleep peacefully at night in our beds because brave men are willing to do violence on our behalf. I believe it very likely that all sorts of missions of these sorts are afoot continually—stopping jihadists from getting close, getting in, getting us. And it is a tribute to the 24/7/366 watchcare of these patriots that I don’t spend any time at all worrying about bad guys. It is also a mark of God’s favor on us that from sea to shining sea we have been safe since That Day. The same can’t be said for the brave men and women of the Armed Forces, and my hat is off to them, whether or not they can act.

Don’t take your boys unless you’re okay with them walking straight from the theater to the recruiting office.