the audience applauded

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Strong message, horrifying results; it definitely does what it tries to do.

So some reviewers found this Islamaphobic and Anti-Islam. Are you aware that the two bombers were Islamic? So that eliminates your silly argument. As for the movie itself, it was just OK. I find Wahlberg barely tolerable at best, and the rest of the cast just seemed to wander around. The hunting of the terrorists was done decently, but overall, if I never see this again, I'd be ok with that.

It was hard to look away from the screen throughout the entire runtime. I went in thinking it would be another jazzed up Hollywood recount of a tragedy with countless factual inaccuracies, but I was so wrong. Watched in class and half the students around me were crying by the end and I can't stop thinking about it. Putting real archival footage in this was an excellent decision made by Berg, and made it feel that much more real.My main complaint was that the cast was really star-studded and gave away who lives and dies in the movie relatively quickly. John Goodman isn't signing onto a role just to be killed halfway through. I would have like lesser known or newcomer actors to play the leads, would've just felt less familiar that what it was when using well known actors.

'Patriots Day' is another "based-on-real-events" film by Berg, after 'Lone Survivor' and 'Deepwater Horizon' - and this is just as good. I think once he got 'Battleship' out of his system, he's only got good directing left! He takes his time introducing a set of ~10 characters in the first 20min (no titles), in the lead up to and the start of the 2013 Boston Marathon. Tommy (Wahlberg) is the everyman cop, Carol (Monaghan) is his wife, Ed (Goodman) is the police commissioner, DesLauriers (Bacon) is the FBI agent, Tamerlan (Melikidze) and Dzhokhar (Wolff) are the bombers, and there's a few other 'regular' couples introduced, so we get coverage of the incident from various angles.Once the bombs go off, it's utter chaos and is shown very realistically - heart-wrenchingly so - with plenty of smoke, blood, sirens and people screaming everywhere. Tommy does the best he can, but it's good to see him exhausted and overwhelmed once he's back home with Carol. We see firsthand some of the victims in hospital - plenty of amputations. Then, it turns to police/FBI efficiency, with a "hours since bombing" graphic letting us know the timeline, as they try to catch the suspects. This man-hunt aspect of the film keeps the momentum up.Some of the characters we've been following that seem to have no role are suddenly involved (i.e. Sergeant Pugliese (Simmons) and Meng (Yang)) as the man-hunt escalates into a shootout. I'm not entirely sure of the actual events that happened after the marathon bombing, so I'm not sure how much creative license was taken by Berg, but there's a satisfactory conclusion. The film wraps up with the real-life people of the characters we've been watching speaking on the impact it's had on their lives. There's some truly emotional and touching moments throughout the film, and while it's sometimes too overtly patriotic, it shows the impact on real people and their resilience.