Not everyone knows the story of the first U.S. combat forces in Afghanistan after 9/11. As related in the 2009 book “Horse Soldiers,” a small team of 12 Green Berets — known as Task Force Dagger — achieved a startling victory. Assisted on the ground by ragtag fighters loyal to an Afghan warlord and, from the sky by U.S. bombers, the men — often on horseback — helped liberate a stronghold of the Taliban and al-Qaida, Mazar-e Sharif, within a matter of weeks.
Their return to the United States was greeted with little fanfare.
While it’s gratifying — and occasionally gripping — to see that story told in “12 Strong,” the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced film contains few genuine surprises, at least from a cinematic standpoint. Despite solid performances by the ensemble cast, led by Chris Hemsworth as cocksure Capt. Mitch Nelson and Michael Shannon as his grumpy, retirement-ready second-in-command, Chief Warrant Officer Hal Spencer, the fictionalized film relies heavily on cliché, including the kind of swaggering banter one might expect from a video game.
“That’s what I call a target-rich environment,” cracks one member of Nelson’s team, when they are informed that their tiny squad is up against more than 50,000 Taliban fighters.
The enemy is embodied by an almost cartoonish, black-clad Taliban mullah, who, when he’s not executing a weeping schoolteacher for educating girls or firing a barrage of RPGs at Nelson and his men, is peering through the red-tinted lenses of binoculars that suggest a satanic malevolence.
Make no mistake: “12 Strong” is a Western, set in the mountains of Afghanistan. It isn’t just the horses or the bleakly beautiful terrain (which director Nicolai Fuglsig uses to great advantage). Despite these and other staples of the genre, the film’s macho dialogue — inflected with an gallows humor that renders the real-world gravity of the situation unserious — makes the protagonists of “12 Strong” come across as Western posers.
“I wasn’t going to let you have all the fun,” says one of Nelson’s men, as he joins his commander in what only seems like, but really isn’t, a matter of life and death.
What the film does well is underscore the story’s essential absurdity. Its heroes are dropped into a country where they don’t speak the language; don’t know how to ride horses (except for Nelson, who grew up on a ranch); and are clueless, culturally, about Muslims in general and Afghans in particular. Orders seem to be issued by an inept and reckless bureaucracy. The helicopter that takes the men to Afghanistan flies at an unsafe altitude and is supplied with oxygen masks that don’t work.
“There are no right choices,” says General Dostum (Navid Negahban), the Afghan warlord who is fighting alongside Nelson, fatalistically. “This is Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires.”
Far from the rah-rah kind of war story that some may be used to, “12 Strong” is suffused with Dostum’s cynicism. Although it’s refreshing in a way, that attitude flies in the face of everything else that the movie tries to tell us — that Nelson and company are fighting to right a wrong, and that it matters.
More often than not, “12 Strong” feels like a sports movie, where all the stakes rest on a single field goal.
’12 STRONG’
2 stars
Rating: R (for war violence and language throughout)
Cast: Chris Hemsworth, Michael Shannon, Michael Peña, Elsa Pataky, William Fichtner, Navid Negahban, Trevante Rhodes, Geoff Stults
Director: Nicolai Fuglsig
Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes
