Peter Berg's latest directorial effort, the Navy SEALs drama Lone Survivor, is no better than a limp retelling that fails to get underneath the surface of the actual story.

| Original Score: D+ | Sep 5, 2017

Despite the lack of character development, watching these guys struggle to prevail was enthralling and heartbreaking all at once.

| Original Score: B+ | Apr 23, 2015

For all its flaws it is both a gripping action thriller and an unforgettable depiction of the cold realities of war. My first reaction after seeing it was a simple one: this must be how it was. It may be the highest tribute I can pay.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Feb 18, 2014

While the violence is horrifying, the encasing narrative is perversely "heroic", with corn-fed dialogue presented as solidly non-ironic, and images of the real-life combatants used to stirring, manipulative ends.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 1, 2014

An occasionally smart script - and four excellent actors - keep the project grounded.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 31, 2014

Lone Survivor does a magnificent job of making disorder intelligible. It's not a very nice film. But it is a splendidly effective one.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 31, 2014

Lone Survivor does a magnificent job of making disorder intelligible. It's not a very nice film. But it is a splendidly effective one.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 31, 2014

Replete with a certain kind of self-importance and self-forgiveness, this Afghan war movie starring Mark Wahlberg has a distinctively martyred America-at-bay feel.

| Original Score: 2/5 | Jan 30, 2014

There are nuggets of honesty amid the gung-ho jingoism in Peter Berg's starry-eyed war story.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Jan 30, 2014

The film alternates between the pulverisingly immediate and dismayingly generic.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 30, 2014

[The second act] is the core of the film, and it works very well. What falls on either side has been designed to support it, but comes close to achieving the opposite.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 30, 2014

Lone Survivor isn't always sophisticated ... But there's moral complexity and a climax in an Afghan village which is tense and surprisingly moving.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 28, 2014

A severe portrait of fortitude under extreme pressure, somewhat marred by blinkered politics.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Jan 27, 2014

There's a gruesome, you-are-there authenticity to the action as the heroes spill their blood and guts on the battlefield.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 11, 2014

The film effectively assaults its audience almost as aggressively as its subjects.

| Jan 10, 2014

The film's director, Peter Berg, wants to immerse you so deeply that you feel as if your bones are breaking, too. There's a price, of course, for that kind of immersion: It becomes tough to see the movie for the drum-beating.

| Jan 10, 2014

Lone Survivor is a brutally effective movie, made by people who think that they're serving their country. But they're just making us coarser and more self-centered.

| Jan 10, 2014

Berg's fine achievement is in relaying that sense of abject danger even as he and his actors honor the utter connection of the men who lost their lives that day.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Jan 10, 2014

With a conventional style,the film puts us in the center of a relentless, fatal battle in Afghanistan. Lone Survivor will make you squirm, but earns every wrenching minute.

| Jan 10, 2014

The sensation of being pinned down and shot apart is so harrowingly conveyed by Peter Berg's fact-based war movie Lone Survivor that one almost forgives the movie's failure to be quite as persuasive in almost every other respect.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Jan 10, 2014