No Room for Sympathy

For the Navy and the SEAL community it was, “Hey, you need 500 more SEALs’ and that launched a series of initiatives to try to attract more people. This film was one of those initiatives.
—Rear Adm. Denny Moynihan

“We want viewers to truly understand what it means to be a Navy SEAL,” says Scott Waugh before Act of Valor begins. He and the other half of the Bandito Brothers, Mike McCoy, also want you to feel the SEALs’ “real emotion” and the “connection they have with their real wives and their real kids.” As these former stuntmen were putting their film together, they explain, they realized that the best way to get to all this truth and realness was to present the real SEALs.

And so the cast of Act of Valor includes not only Roselyn Sánchez as a beautiful CIA operative and Alex Veadov as a dramatically long-haired arms dealer and Ukrainian Jew nicknamed Christo, but also some active duty Navy SEALs as Navy SEALs. The directors came up with this idea when making a training film for the US military and then cast their uncredited central players, as Lieutenant Commander Rorke and Chief Dave, to help you to understand what it means to be them.

Apparently, what that mostly means is parachuting from AV-8B Harrier jump jets and driving trucks through Costa Rican jungles, and sometimes, as at this film’s start, partying with wives and children on a beach in San Diego—a party that goes on just long enough so that Dave can introduce each team member by name and thumbnail designation (Sonny’s “made of granite,” Ajay grew up “dirt poor”). The wives, mostly nameless, are consistently supportive, of course, even if, as Dave notes, they can’t know exactly what their husbands do to fight the “threats everywhere.” And oh yes, Rorke’s wife Jackie (Ailsa Marshall) is pregnant with their first child, a storyline introduced even as you’re watching Sánchez’s Morales snatched by a bunch of terrorists and tortured with a power drill. 

As Morales is hung from the ceiling by her wrists and her tank top clings to her bloody torso, the SEALs leave their families behind (“War is a country of will,” narrates Dave, “There is no room for sympathy. If you’re not willing to give up everything, you’ve already lost”) and initiate the extraction, as well as Act of Valor‘s “immersive” action experience. This stands in stark contrast to the very awkward domestic dialogue scenes (“I love you, baby”). Once they’re leaping and running and wearing face paint, the SEALs look more like the video game heroes this recruitment project has in mind. Their methods are efficient and their results are awesome: explosions and shootouts and speedy escapes on hijacked pickup trucks and waiting Navy vessels. No sooner do they take out the sweaty bad guys holding Morales and get her to a rescue boat, than they learn they’ve got more to do, namely, get the masterminds behind her kidnapping.

If this part of the story is not so “real” (that is, most SEAL teams don’t go out on serial missions), it does afford the movie a chance to double down on its villains as Christo, who likes his liquor served on a yacht, by a girl in a bikini, is aligned with a scar-faced Chechen Muslim named Shabal (Jason Cottle), their current partnership evolved out of a childhood friendship (a very convenient cliché deployed so you can truly understand the SEALs’ experience). If they don’t precisely believe in the same cause, they do share a penchant for mayhem and a general rage at the world, as Christo reveals during the film’s only engaging scene, his interrogation by Rorke and Dave’s perversely witty senior officer (called “Senior”), who keeps calling his prisoner “Crisco.”

The good guys learn that the bad guys mean to send 16 suicide bombers across the US-Mexico border via a tunnel (suggesting that the much discussed fence is not such an effective deterrent). “It will make 9/11 look like a walk in the park,” boasts Christo, just so you know what’s at stake here. The showdown on the border features lots of shooting and exploding and heart-beating soundtrack and a passel of NVG POV helmet shots, emulating first-person-shooter video games, much as these once emulated on-the-ground experience.

It’s this representational circle that makes Act of Valor worth contemplating at all. As a story, it’s ludicrous, and even as an immersive ride, it’s not news. But as a self-admitted recruiting film, an effort to introduce young viewers to a mythology, it’s a little disturbing. It follows a logic much like “Citizens United.” If corporations and SuperPacs can engage in the “free speech” of massive spending, it makes sense that the sometimes resourceful military can collaborate with opportunistic (if true-believing) filmmakers. “Put your pain in a box,” narrates Dave, “Use it as fuel, as ammunition.” He’s talking to someone sort of specific in the film, but also to kids everywhere. And most of them have played this game already.