You want to like this. The story, whilst hardly new, is good and open to having so much fun with. However, too much of the story is derivative and not even done with much or any originality. It therefore weighs very heavily on updating that story with new pace and verve but thanks to some very wooden acting on the part of one lead and some of the worst editing this side of a junior school video project, it fails. The inconsistency of a couple of serving special operations team members being on a personal rescue mission is pretty jarring, but liveable with. It's a standard trope that is used and abused to the point that you'd think US special operations command is a country gun club. What is not the the editing - utterly abysmal - that leaves you watching irrelevant film to connect the parts that actually drive the story forward. It's like watching one of those documentaries that endlessly repeats itself so that you can make a 5 minute story take 25 minutes to tell. An example: 30 seconds dedicated to a car driving out of a car park. Do that - or similar - every 2 minutes (or indeed, in one long pointless sequence for 10 minutes) and you cut down the need for actual drama hugely. In doing so, you take all the drama and pace out of the production. There are lots of decent parts - a firefight that is well done in Afghanistan, albeit unoriginal with hints of an actual firefight that led to a Medal of Honour and the dramatisation of Marcus Luttrel's story. However, if you are ex-military, look away. The real problem is that the connections between those parts are lost in editing that would give Alfred Hitcock (indeed any director who understands the need for every part to add to the whole) a stress induced hernia. Bad direction and editing can rarely be overcome by decent acting, but there is no hope of that here either: 2/3 of protagonists are decently acted, the other is hopelessly stiff and unsure of who they are, what their objectives are and what they are doing - honestly it's Razzie territory. As are much of the supporting cast. Overall, watchable if you've hosed every other choice and haven't yet decided to see if things that are rated at 1-3 stars are really unfair characterisations of gems. On the other hand, if you aren't unwell over Christmas, aren't lying in bed with nothing else to do and have something else to do, avoid.

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