Reviews

I've watched this movie 8 times, and each time I'm able to sort out the convolutions just a little bit better. But now that I've sorted out everything that can be sorted out, I've finally understood that it has not been my intellectual inabilities that have me feeling so confused, but rather the holes in the storyline.

Because I've warned this has spoilers, I'm heading straight to the end of the movie. John Travolta's character, it turns out, had actually set things up way before the beginning of the movie to be inserted into the interrogation ("running into" the COL in a parking lot "by chance"). He and his team already knew there was a drug ring inside the base being run by the COL, so along with West, they set up the training exercise to expose the bad guys. You also find out that everyone out in the field except the two bad guys, Mueller and Kendall, are part of Travolta's team.

Knowing this, when you watch the movie from the beginning, almost nothing that happens is congruent. That's my biggest problem with this movie. You never actually find out what happened out in the field. Ever. Somehow the bad guys ended up dead and the good guys all ended up alive and making breakfast together. But how exactly that came to be is never fully revealed.

Another problem are some of the totally implausible events (and I say this as a former Army CPT.) A prisoner having a needle still in his pocket and within his reach such that he can bring it out as a reveal in the middle of an interrogation? Heads would have rolled.

Now, that being said, there's a reason I've watched it 8 times. It is incredibly entertaining. The acting is solid (I could watch Samuel L Jackson, Ty Diggs, and John Travolta all day long), the directing is superb, and the tension is taut, regardless of how little sense certain events make or how implausible certain events would be.

I have watched every episode since it premiered and have found the plot(s) increasingly convoluted to the point of being utterly incomprehensible. I'm a pretty smart cookie, but even when I watch an episode twice, I can't follow the dual story lines as the show bounces back and forth between "now" and "a year ago."

On one hand, the dialog borders on the silly, and on the other, calamitous events (such as the beheading of the President's wife) are dealt with as if they are just one more stressor. There's so much constant betrayal that by the 8th episode of the second season, the viewer has no sense of loyalty to any of the characters anymore. That sense of not knowing who's a good guy and who's a bad guy could be fun if written with some sense of how the audience is feeling at any given time. But instead, it seems to be plot twists for the sake of plot twists.

I'm pretty well done with this show. I really enjoyed the first 6-8 episodes of the first season. But this...this is a waste of time. Shame on the writers and directors for making these good actors go through this nonsense.