Svoboda | Graniru | BBC Russia | Golosameriki | Facebook

(2013)

Critic Reviews

60

Metascore

Based on 44 critic reviews provided by Metacritic.com
80
Berg, who wrote and directed, is more interested in how men deal with battle than the ideals or the politics that put them there. What the movie achieves, with a gruesome energy and a remarkable reality, is a firefight.
80
All four performances are first-rate, and the action is staged with shattering intensity.
75
Together, all four cast members help draw a line across the narrative-separating when we were watching a mildly engaging depiction of names, dates, and locations, and a hellish, immersive situation with no easy outcome in sight.
75
Survivor is a pummeling, frenzied ride, one of fall's most charged action films. The gunfights and rocket-propelled grenades are palpable, and Berg manages to make the chaos followable.
75
Berg is relentlessly unsparing.
75
Wahlberg remains one of our most reliable and least actorly of movie stars, innately macho but vulnerable enough to seem like a human being caught in an inhuman situation.
75
Like the best war movies, Lone Survivor laces action with moral questions that haunt and provoke.
75
Lone Survivor is primarily about the unflinching bravery of SEALs executing their mission and looking out for one another, even as they're coming to grips with the reality of how this thing is going to end.
75
The middle 40 minutes of Lone Survivor have to be some of the toughest battle scenes in Hollywood history - an epic, close-range firefight that finds the SEALs throwing themselves down rock faces like superheroes. Only they aren't superheroes - they bleed, they break.
70
Berg's blunt, pummeling style offers few nuances and makes no apologies, but his broad brushstrokes have clearly found an ideal canvas in this grimly heroic rendering of hell on earth.
70
The film is rugged, skilled, relentless, determined, narrow-minded and focused, everything that a soldier must be when his life is on the line.
70
The New York Times
It is a modest, competent, effective movie, concerned above all with doing the job of explaining how the job was done.
68
Ultimately seems at war with itself, torn between its duties as an entertaining, engaging movie and a somber, sincere memorial, and in splitting the difference, the film effectively assaults its audience almost as aggressively as its subjects.
63
The characters are only superficially sketched in, but we still fear for them, understand their code and above all else, appreciate the dirty, bloody, high-risk work these professionals do. That they go through all this and risk everything, by choice, is something Berg, to his credit, never lets us forget.
63
The actors are excellent, as are the bruising re-creations of the firefight and the uncountable injuries sustained.
50
There hasn't been this bizarre mixture of hooah and death since John Wayne hung up his combat boots.
50
Lone Survivor is a grotesque action movie at times impressively directed by Peter Berg that combines the brute masculinity with the ugliness of the battlefield and viscerally unsettling shock value. But it's less a depiction of courage than a brutish magnification of anger and pain, both of which it conveys a lot better than the high ground that it reaches for.
50
The simplicity of Lone Survivor eventually becomes a handicap, because after a certain point, the film becomes just one long battle sequence, lacking narrative ebb and flow.
50
Lone Survivor burns with the fever of a passion project. Writer-director Peter Berg's gratitude to United States servicemen for all their sacrifice comes through viscerally, from first frame to last.
50
Lone Survivor, from start to finish, is a tale of disaster, of bad luck and bad communication, perhaps even faulty planning, though that's hard to say. So the movie loses the common touch of average folk trying to get by, while also losing some of the pleasure of watching a crack unit at work.
40
Peter Berg's ultra-bloody battle film “Lone Survivor” is ultimately more grueling than satisfying. It's more carnage than cinema.
38
Like his prior "The Kingdom," Peter Berg's film pretends to dabble in a frothy moral ambiguity, swiftly betraying its true aims with trigger-happy jingoism.
20
Berg may be adhering to the basic facts, but his movie's childish machismo is a disgrace to all involved.
See all 44 reviews on Metacritic.com

More Critic Reviews

See all external reviews for Lone Survivor (2013) »

See also

Awards | FAQ | User Reviews | User Ratings | External Reviews | Message Board