Review of Man Down (2015) by Chris O — 16 Mar 2017

Although the intentions are pure, "Man Down" is an absolute mess with little to offer.

When U.S. Marine Gabriel Drummer (Shia LaBeouf) returns home from his tour in Afghanistan, he finds that the place he once called home is no better than the battlefields he fought on overseas. Accompanied by his best friend Devin Roberts (Jai Courtney), a hardnosed Marine whose natural instinct is to shoot first and ask questions later, he searches desperately for the whereabouts of his estranged son, Johnathan (Charlie Shotwell), and wife, Natalie (Kate Mara).

When I watched the trailers, I was actually very excited. I was really excited to see Shia LaBeouf's performance, as I really appreciate him as an actor. Here, he lived up to expectations and more. He gave an amazing performance and carried the entire film on his back. If this movie was any good, he'd probably be in contention for one of the best performances of the year. Too bad nothing else was really working.

The story was a complete mess. In fact, I didn't even know what the intention of the story was until the last few minutes. Throughout the movie, there are about 3-4 separate story-lines going on at the same time and it makes everything really confusing. I understood what they were going for and the story was interesting enough, but it was a complete mess. The way they tried to weave the stories did not fit and it broke the movie down into a catastrophe. If they had only focused on 1 or 2 of the stories, it probably would've worked a lot better.

The story, although it had potential, was extremely predictable. I'm not one who likes to call out obvious upcoming events or to guess what will happen because what's the fun in that? I don't like to think that far ahead because it makes the current situation feel more genuine and exciting. But here, I ended up guessing the entire film before it even got halfway.

The trailer was very misleading. I actually loved how the trailer was mashed together but it made this movie out to be something that it's not. I don't know if that's the editing team's fault or the director, but they weren't on the same page when it came to creating the trailer. This movie is a war/sci-fi psychological drama, not a war movie alone. It's a film about extreme PTSD and it needed to be more clear on that.

Although Shia had an amazing performance, the movie's intentions were encapsulated by the mess they called a story.