Review: SEAL Team Eight: Behind Enemy Lines

Tom Sizemore oversees a team of Navy SEALs (led by the fabulously named Lex Shrapnel. That can’t be a real name, surely!) on an unsanctioned mission in the Congo to stop the sale of weapons-grade uranium. First they must locate a CIA informant played by Aurélie Meriel, who apparently has vital information on the big baddie behind it all. Leroy Gopal turns up as the nasty African warlord also standing in their way.

 

Although IMDb claims this 2014 action flick is part of the “Behind Enemy Lines” franchise, I’m not sure if it’s a direct sequel or merely a spin-off to its own tangentially related “Seal Team Eight” series of films. None of the “Behind Enemy Lines” films have that much in common besides the title (here it’s the subtitle, though) and vaguely similar war movie plotting. What I do know is that Director/cinematographer/co-writer Roel Reine (“The Marine 2”, “Death Race 2”) once again shows that he knows a lot more about directing/photographing a film than he does about casting or choosing a screenplay. Co-scripted by Brendan Cowles and Shane Kuhn (writers of Reine’s OK Satanically-flavoured western “Dead in Tombstone”), this one just doesn’t have anyone to care about, and although the film looks terrific and the action is well-done, the latter really needed to be more visceral and immersive to overcome the film’s shortcomings. Basically, it needed to be “Black Hawk Down”, where the individual characters didn’t matter because Ridley Scott made it in such an immersive way that you felt like you yourself were in the thick of it.

 

It’s not the cheapjack shit I was expecting, just a bit blah in between the gunplay, and Reine does cock up at one point in failing to hide the film’s supposedly surprise villain (poor acting in the role doesn’t help). Also, Tom Sizemore is barely in the film. He’s quite good, but far better utilised in “Company of Heroes”. Here he’s got the military ‘talking head’ role that could just as easily have gone to Dale Dye (veteran technical consultant), Glenn Morshower (TV’s “24”), or Bill Smitrovich (a TV veteran of hard-arse roles). Sizemore does his best and I hope he’ll get some A-grade offers again at some point, but there’s not much he can do here.

 

As you would expect from Reine (except when he’s using shit-grade DV on something like “The Lost Tribe”) the film looks really good, with some of his infamous ‘black lighting’ here and there. Thankfully he doesn’t shoot the entire film that way, ala a Tom Stern (“Million Dollar Baby”). He has a particular way with natural sources of light, like sunlight and moonlight, which I really dug. It’s Reine’s best-looking film to date. I kinda liked that the characters were no-nonsense types who don’t wave the Yankee flag in everyone’s face. Like in “Lone Survivor”, they don’t pat themselves on the back, they just do their damn job. So I liked that, but it still would’ve been nice if any of the characters actually stood out, though. I also have to roll my eyes at this film’s idea of tough guy dialogue; ‘I see your FUBAR and raise you a fugly’. Um, no. Nice try, but FUBAR stands for ‘Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition’ and is quite clearly worse than ‘fugly’ (AKA ‘Fucking Ugly’). That was stupid.

 

One of these days Reine is gonna make a truly worthwhile action film, but for now he’s making films that just hit shy of the mark, and this one’s probably a bit wider than that. Action junkies with a particular fondness for action/operational-oriented warfare will like this better than most. The African Congo locations are also quite different. Look out for the completely rushed, ridiculous sex scene that has absolutely no place in the film. Boinking right in the middle of an op? Really? I don’t think so.

 

Rating: C