Clinton Too Busy Campaigning to See New Benghazi Movie

“The release of “13 Hours” will re-start the conversation over Benghazi and introduce a whole new audience to the events of that night”, said Brian O. Walsh, president of Future45, a super PAC funded by top Republican donors. Those similarly rousing accounts of real-life heroes earned $25million and $107million during the same period in 2013 and 2015, respectively, with “American Sniper”, about Iraq war sharpshooter Chris Kyle, ultimately raking in a breathtaking $350million. It’s no “Zero Dark Thirty”, not even a “Lone Survivor”, and perhaps the sheer volume of blood spilled for the sake of excitement and hoo-rah is too great to consider the film deeply respectful of its subject matter.

Box office analysts forecast that “13 Hours”, which has a budget of $50 million and is opening in 2,400 theaters, should bring in an opening weekend of $20 million to $25 million. It reportedly makes no mention of Clinton, then the U.S. Secretary of State, but has again raised the topic of the Democratic presidential candidate’s role in the tragedy, three months after Republicans grilled her on her response to the attacks during an 11-hour congressional hearing in October. And they say it’s done. Even more interesting is that while promoting the movie, Michael Bay actually commented that one of the reasons he’s going back to do another Transformers is that he actually had to beg studios to get 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi greenlit.

“There never was a stand-down order”, Bob, speaking publicly for the first time, told the Washington Post.

“13 Hours”, though, is not a awful film. Despite its dog-whistle marketing, the content of the film might disappoint the most rabid Hillary haters. That doesn’t excuse him from previously making awful films, but it does seem that any time a film he genuinely wants to make comes along (a similar example is the hilariously underrated Pain and Gain, a movie where all of his juvenile humor perfectly blends with the true story he was recounting), it ends up being anywhere from tolerable to good. Rather than a red-meat attack on the Obama administration, “13 Hours” engages in a kind of diffuse, all-purpose cynicism about Washington as a familiar metonym for incompetence, corruption and bureaucratic inertia. For once not being able to tell who is whom works in the movie’s favor because neither could they at times.

13 Hours repackages the story in Bay’s trademark slick, ultra-patriotic fashion, with its handful of bloodied veterans hunkered down against an overwhelming threat as flags wave (or burn) over their shoulders. It’s also a movie where his incoherent action can be considered a strength, depending on how much you can accept before growing exhausted of all the mayhem.

“There’s such a responsibility in this particular story”, says John Krasinski, who plays Jack Silva, one of the Central Intelligence Agency contractors and former Navy SEAL.

“It feels like it was hard for people to buy a ticket if they were more liberal leaning”, Rob Moore, Paramount’s vice-chairman, told Variety on Sunday. “We just had to get it right”.