A team of Navy SEALs is being dispatched to rescue a kidnapped CIA agent from a jungle camp in Costa Rica. While being successful, this is only the start into a series of missions that will lead the elite team to targets all over the world to uncover a terrorist network.

A short synopsis, but there isn’t that much story to start with, so I could easily spoil the whole movie with a few sentences. I also can’t mention the actors, because the SEALs were played by actual SEALs, meaning that (beside staying anonymous) the acting is mostly poor, the characters are swallow (one of them having a pregnant wife is as deep as it gets) and hard to distinguish (wearing uniforms doesn’t make that easier). So does this movie suck? Well, if you expect story and acting, yes and you can stop reading here. But if you can overlook that, maybe you will enjoy this movie. The photography is really, really nice. Well placed views and angles, making it almost eye-candy, if it wasn’t about shooting people. And of course the action is great and if you love action, you will love this flick. From that point of view, it was a great idea to let SEALs play the SEALs, because it feels natural to them, making the action believable (something you often miss). That also makes it more realistic, since they don’t have to figure out how they would behave in a real life situation, since this is something they do for a living. But of course, there is the obvious downer of it being an very patriotic movie. Not that I hate patriotism, but if it turns into a 110 minute commercial for the armed forces, you can get annoyed a bit. And somehow I do believe this is one of the reasons, why the movie is so successful in the US, beside being a mindless action movie with great pictures. Oh and of course, Tom Clancy had his fingers in this.

Links: IMDB: Act of Valor, IMDB: This review