By: debbie lynn elias
This is the movie that action fans the world over have been craving. Directors Scott Waugh and Mike “Mouse” McCoy have set the highest possible bar for excellence and authenticity with ACT OF VALOR. The most authentic action move ever made, Waugh and McCoy showcase “the best of the best”, not only technically and emotionally, but with the casting of “the best of the best” – active duty Navy Seals – not to mention pilots, aviators, nuclear submarine operators and other real military members. In short, ACT OF VALOR is Wow, Wow, Wow, Wow, Wow!!!! Creating a fictionalized story thread based on actual mission experiences and operations of the Navy Seals we see in the film, the result is an edge of your seat, heart-pounding thrill ride that will have you walking in the shoes of real life American heroes. As for filmmaking, the technical precision, creativity and originality is unparalleled thanks in large part to Cinematographer Shane Hurlbut. And the impact of this film was only intensified for me as while I was sitting in the theater screening ACT OF VALOR, Seal Team 6 was in Somalia performing their latest much publicized rescue mission of a young American woman.
ACT OF VALOR is truly global in scale. An American politician is assassinated via an ice cream truck explosion that not only kills him, but a hundred innocent school children. The terrorist executing the attack walks away from the scene. But this is no random act. Who and what are behind it remain to be seen.
Thousands of miles away, CIA operative Lisa Morales is working deep undercover under guise of Doctors Without Borders, when she uncovers a plot that appears to involve one of the worldfs most known terrorists. With specifics not yet known, her own CIA contact meets up with her, only to be blown away while Morales is kidnaped and taken hostage. Not sitting idly by, the Navy Seals are called into action. Their mission: to rescue Morales who is being held and brutally tortured somewhere deep in the jungles of South America. With precision planning and timing, the Seals move in for what should be a simple, but covert, extraction.
Meanwhile, high powered meetings are taking place across the globe between a man named Christo and a wacked out Osama bin Laden look-alike, Shabal. Christo is just out to run guns, drugs and whatever else will rack up cash and allow him to continue to live a life of luxury. Shabal, on the other hand, has dreams of killing millions and destroying the United States by any means necessary.
With the rescue of Morales, and other intel, it doesn’t take long before the pieces of the puzzle start coming together and the global scope of what is about to unfold becomes known. It’s up to the Seals to thwart not only an attack on America but potential global war.
Let’s start with the Seals who shall remain nameless. As you will see in the film, the full names of the Seals are not given during the film nor in the credits, thus affording them some levels of continued anonymity for their work as active duty Seals. Each man is his own character study and knowing that what we are seeing on screen is who and what each man is in life, is both astounding and humbling. While we get a glimpse of individuality and the humanity of each Seal, what fascinates is the collective; the brotherhood. Analogous to the Borg Collective in the world of Star Trek, Bandito Brothers functions with each an integral part of the other. Maneuvering in ops in silence. The touch of a shoulder. The tacitly knowing responsiveness. Decisive, intelligent, fast thinking and respectful questioning. Notable is the adherence to chain of command and the respect that goes with that. But to see little glimpses behind the stoic exterior is wondrous to watch. While each man shows little or no emotion, each wears his heart on his sleeve – especially when it comes to the unit. Even something as small as a Seal pulling down a rag from a window to cover Lisa Morales as they extract her – that may be viewed as gratuitous in any other film, but here, it fits the demeanor and code of conduct of the man. A wonderful nuanced touch that speaks volumes. While I expect many who see this film to criticize the “acting” of the Seals, I don’t. They aren’t acting. They are living and reliving. Having known so many military men going into combat, coming home from combat, in combat, the cadence, vocal inflections and intonations of slow syllabic indifference rings true. There is no room for emoting or emotion. Everything is mechanized. And straightforward, lack of inflected speech patterns is necessary for communication, especially radio coms.
According to Scott Waugh, “Once we realized we were going to use the real guys, it was like, ’Who are we going to surround them with?’ And we didn’t want to alter the authenticity of the movie by say, having them go and rescue Michelle Pfeiffer. . .You’re trying to find the most talented actors you can find but really not that recognizable.” The meld of supporting actors is impeccable. There’s something about their performances that seem elevated beyond that we normally see.
Described by Waugh as the actor most “facially recognized by people”, Roselyn Sanchez stuns as Lisa Morales. Needing someone believable who would be indigenous to the area, according to McCoy, “[Sanchez] had the ability to totally blend in, fluent in Spanish and English. We took a chance on having somebody as well known as Roselyn being a distraction in this authentic mission.” Sanchez is always visually expressive and here, as Lisa, she steps it up a notch. Calling her own performance “brutal” given the places she went emotionally – a woman being tortured and unable to speak – Sanchez used the slightest movements to speak what words don’t say. A slow turn of her hand to show the holes drilled, a murmuring lip. Beautiful.
When it comes to depicting brutality to Sanchez’ Lisa Morales, Waugh has an important caveat. “[What is in the film] is probably the most tame thing that [Seals] would have seen. What they’ve seen is so far beyond our comprehension of brutality, that we wanted to still showcase – these people [enemies/terrorists] are bad. They do really horrific things. What we did with Roselyn, as horrific as it is, it’s elementary compared to the thing they are doing to our [people].”
I would love to know where Alex Veadov’s been hiding – besides in video games doing voices. As Christo he is enigmatic but very likeable with more than an aura of mystique. He oozes slickness but with warmth. And like Sanchez, his facial expressiveness speaks volumes to the tone of a scene or the conscience of Christo.
Always a welcome sight is Nestor Serrano and while he has minimal screen time, he makes the most of it. Although Serrano is a known commodity to audiences, according to Waugh, “Nestor has his own thing, but it didnft last too long so I didn’t think it would really alter us too much.”
As a high powered CIA operative and Morales’ contact, he’s also just a regular Joe. Similarly, Emilio Rivera just had to turn up as one of the Mexican cartel as his usual strong, frightening self. Truly frightening is Broadway’s Jason Cottle as Shabal, embodying a wacked out Bin Laden persona and look. Cottle truly puts the fear of God into one as you watch him on screen.
A truly collaborative effort between the Seals, McCoy, Waugh and screenwriter Kurt Johnstad, according to Waugh, “When we were doing research on [the film], Mouse and I really wanted to extract the story from within first. We finally got the guys, after about six months, to trust us and really started to tell us of these acts of valor that have happened to them. Once we found five that were really truly powerful stories that you wouldnft really believe until you met the guys, then we came and we found Kurt. We met with Kurt and told him, ’Here’s these five acts of valor. Let’s talk about how to now fictitiously weave a story thread and narrative through these incredible acts of valor.’ ” Combining a “fictional” story with a team of actual, active Navy Seals, it doesn’t get any truer or more real than this. The story is intriguing, fascinating. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen thanks to the complexity and detail of the story itself, as well as the integral action and the men themselves. The story is truly 21st century, demonstrating the fact that everything interacts with everything and everyone else and that we exist in a truly global world with a chain reaction ripple effect. Beyond the action and intrigue, there’s also some humor compliments of an interrogation of Christo on his glamorous yacht, as well as great poignancy with the Seals and their family lives and a story thread that will bring tears to your eyes.
Important to McCoy is that “the film does not take place in a foreign conflict overall. . . It’s really about the men who are going shoulder to shoulder and risking their lives for the sake of us and our safety overall. So we really wanted it to have no political slant at all.” Expounding on that, Waugh opines that ACT OF VALOR is about, “[A] rare breed of someone who wants to do something so heroic for no recognition and we think they deserve to be recognized.” Four years in the making, “almost every guy that’s in the film was redeployed on a combat mission during the making of this movie.”
Quite often with co-directors, the experience can be “less than stellar” for the actors and crew. But that’s not the case with ACT OF VALOR. Exhibiting the same level of camaraderie as the Seals themselves, Sanchez is enthusiastic about the pairing of McCoy and Waugh. “Mouse was more into the technical madness of it all and Scott, because he was an actor at some point himself, he was very much on point guiding the acting through the movie.”
Kudos Kudos Kudos to Mouse McCoy and Scott Waugh!! Personally, I am thrilled to see them both at the helm of ACT OF VALOR. Former professional stuntmen and athletes, they appreciate adrenalin, action, truth and the military. The authenticity is stunning and beyond reproach. I love a parade, and a high tech military one at that. The fascination level is astronomical. I want to see the film again just for the gadgetry, ships, ammo, arsenal, etc. to pick up what I missed. At first blush, we’ve got HALO jumps, a real nuclear submarine that required an air drop of the film crew to mid-ocean coordinates in order to meet up with the sub, boats running up on the emerging sub (all with only one take), and let’s not forget, live ammo.
Particularly effective is the camera work, most notably with the close quarter shots, severe close-ups and the individual POVs. Breathtaking. (And I thought Kathryn Bigelow did a phenomenal job with “The Hurt Locker”! ACT OF VALOR blows that camera work out of the water.) A true master of his craft, cinematographer Shane Hurlbut goes above and beyond not only in perfectly capturing tones of tunnels, subs, battle cruisers, beach camp fires, the heat of the desert (some great imagery with desert drop-offs at sunrise with dirt swirling, making it look like a wildfire), the gloss and open lightness and beauty of the ocean and Christo’s Star Ship, but with his technical savvy. By using fifteen Canon 5D Mark II DSLR cameras (complimented with Canon 7D and 1D cameras and four 35mm cameras, the latter which accounts for 25% of the film we see), the team required less lighting and less crew thus allowing for the intimate lensing. But going above and beyond, Hurlbut designed a waterproof housing for the 5D which allowed the camera to be mounted in vehicles that go hurtling under water. He also designed a system placing 1/4 inch steel plates in front of the CF camera cards in two of the 5Ds which allowed live ammo to be shot directly at the camera and while blowing out the lenses, the CF cards with the imagery was protected. Thanks to the compactness of the 5Ds and Hurlbut’s ingenuity, POV was intensified and camera movements extremely fluid. And just wait until you see the HALO parachute jump. The cinematography does as much to propel the film as the action itself.
With actual ops being planned by the Seals themselves, the entire process was “extremely complex and disciplined. We werenft just winging it out there. It was really thought out and blocked out.”
Key to the authenticity on screen is that the Department of the Navy, Naval Special Warfare Command and Department of Defense allowed McCoy and Waugh full creative control “so we were able to have our viewpoint of their world.” In exchange, “they wanted full TTP – tactics, techniques and procedures – and no classified information were going to be revealed. And we were VERY respectful of that. We didn’t want to show that. Why would we want to show the play book to the enemy?. . . Then afterwards, they actually also scrubbed all the footage. Every frame got scrubbed by every silo that needed to see that to make sure that there was still no classified information.”
Equally important to McCoy is that “We don’t bend physics in this. There’s no CGI in the movie. It’s all in camera and for real. We really set out to make a new kind of action film. One that was grounded in reality.” It doesn’t get much realer than this folks.
ACT OF VALOR. Intense. Electrifying. Heart-pounding. Thrilling. Edge of your seat. Humbling. Proud to be an American.
US Navy Seals – Rorke, Michael, Dave, Ajay, Sonny, Ray, Duncan Smith, Van O, Weimy
Roselyn Sanchez – Lisa Morales
Alex Veadov – Christo
Jason Cottle – Shabal
Directed by Mike “Mouse” McCoy and Scott Waugh. Written by Kurt Johnstad.
