13 Hours review: Michael Bay shoots first, doesn’t ask questions later

Pain & Gain was fun, so maybe there's hope for director Michael Bay when somebody takes away his giant robot playset? We couldn't possibly say. Some two hours plus into this baffling tangle of unintelligible explosions, flying body parts, pounding gunfire, and stuff burning, we're not entirely sure that Bay's jittery recreation of the 2012 attack on a US diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya doesn't feature giant robots.

It has been suggested that 13 Hours is aimed squarely at the less sophisticated viewers of Fox News. To this end, an elite bearded squadron with one-syllable names – coded under GRS (Global Response Staff) – are consistently prevented from doing their duty by meddling, no-nothing Yale and Harvard-educated CIA bureaucrats, as personified by David Costabile's Chief, a character who is so roundly booed and jeered by others, we occasionally thought we were watching Louis van Gaal at Old Trafford.

Confusingly, or possibly cheekily, CIA operatives who lost their lives are saluted before the closing credits.

Taking cues from “zombieland”, the GRS designation for the sheep farms and abattoir adjacent to the Benghazi CIA facility, Bay fashions a zombie apocalypse picture from what we are repeatedly informed is a political shit-show.

Libyans are duly styled as night-walkers who move slowly and moronically into the line of fire. “I feel like I’m in a horror film,” says one of the undifferentiated one-syllable-named mob.

Tellingly, the screenplay was penned by vampire fiction author Chuck Hogan.

As we have no way of figuring out just who is shooting at what, we can only guess that 13 Hours is offering the viewer a Plan 9 From Outer Space-themed conspiracy. So the zombies are in league with the giant robots? That makes as much sense as anything else in the movie.

Unsurprisingly, survivors of the incidents depicted have dismissed the film as utter nonsense. Even if this were not the case, the film-makers have some explaining to do to the military folks Bay presumably seeks to honour. Here, they are little more than bros on parade, men who get dewy-eyed when Skyping their Happy-Meal munching daughters back home as minor chords strike up on the score, but who discuss those same daughters as if they were possessions. They say things like: “Did you lose your tampon, dude?” and mostly behave as though they’re filming a cross-fit video.

So the zombies and giant robots are getting buff? Interesting. No, wait. What’s the opposite of interesting?