This new movie, starring Mark Wahlberg, is perhaps the defining movie (so far) about the Afghanistan War.  It is grim, gritty, beautifully filmed and provocative.

The movie takes a look at a real life battle in Afghanistan in June, 2005 when a small SEAL team was injected into the forbidding territory of the country to try and seek out and kill a major Taliban leader.  The plan soon gets upended when their secret mission is interrupted by a group of goat farmers.

What happens next is real heart-in-your-throat action, which almost seems too real to be a movie.  The running gun battle between the  SEALS and the Taliban fighters is breathless and almost too much to watch.  If you can stomach the realism, the blood and gore, you will find this movie to be an enduring tribute to the heroism of the elite SEAL corps and to those who died up on an unnamed mountain in far away Afghanistan almost a decade ago.

For those of us who enjoyed Tora, Tora, Tora, The Alamo, the Green Berets, Saving Private Ryan, The Great Escape and so many other war movies, this is the best war movie of the new generation.

I give this movie four meatballs, my highest rating.  It is the best Wahlberg movie of his career.   But I also must add, this is a very difficult movie to watch.

 

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