12 Strong (2018)

12 Strong arrives with a title that promises a headcount and delivers exactly that. Twelve men, one horse-borne cavalry charge, and a mission that planners gave two years and the soldiers finished in twenty-three days. The film is based on Doug Stanton's nonfiction account of Operational Detachment Alpha 595, and it carries the flat, procedural confidence of a briefing document. The ensemble is notably mixed in its casting, with Michael Peña, Trevante Rhodes and Navid Negahban filling out the ranks and the Afghan side of the alliance. None of this is framed as an announcement. The unit simply looks like a unit, and the film moves on. That restraint earns a nod, though it is restraint born of indifference, not of principle.

Where the film does extend itself, it is toward General Dostum, played with gravity by Negahban. The relationship between Mitch Nelson and the warlord gets the only real character work on offer, a study in mutual suspicion softening into brotherhood. It is a generous portrait, and it is also an American one, filtered through the needs of the visiting captain. The Afghan perspective exists to validate the visitor's growth. Elsewhere the film is a desert of concerns. No economic critique, no environmental conscience, no interest in bodies, minds, or genders beyond the standard-issue kind. Elsa Pataky appears as a wife, briefly, to be left behind.

The closing postscript delivers the warrior ethos with a straight face, honoring the dead and the decorated in the customary register. This is old-fashioned patriotic sermonizing, not the newer variety, and it lands with the weight of a monument plaque. A competent, honorable, slightly plodding film about men on horses. The classification is straightforward, and the film seems content with that.