The combat is skillfully staged, but it never feels like there's a lot at stake.
Plus IconOwen Gleiberman
Chief Film Critic
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Courtesy of Roadside Attractions For a long time, I thought of the writer-director Rod Lurie as an interesting and ambitious creator of topical drama — hot-button political films like “Deterrence” (1999) and “The Contender” (2000), the trenchant Valerie Plame muckraker “Nothing but the Truth” (2008), the misfired remake of “Straw Dogs” (2011). But Lurie, it’s fair to say, now has two filmmaking identities. There’s the middlebrow dramatist, and there’s the director of hot-wire combat spectacle who first emerged, in 2019, with “The Outpost,” an Afghanistan War drama that was one of most riveting and authentic movies about the experience of war in the post-9/11 world. Lurie is a U.S. Army veteran, and “The Outpost” brought him to a new peak as a filmmaker.
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