"Act of Valor" - The Movie Hollywood Won't Make Anymore

Kurt Schlichter reviews "Act of Valor", the movie featuring actual Navy SEALs which swept to the top of the box office this weekend:

MEMO TO HOLLYWOOD: We have seen the future, and you aren’t in it.

As “Act of Valor” hauls in a tidy $24.5 million to lead the box office pack this weekend, Hollywood has got to be wondering why it’s bloated $100 million epics are tanking while this low-budget, independently-made fireball will make its producers a bundle.

Let me clue you in, Tinseltown – “Act” is an unapologetically pro-military movie that doesn’t have to pretend that the greatest threat to America is space aliens. It’s got action – holy cow, does it have action. It’s got emotion –real emotion, not that hacky “emotional conflict” cookie cutter crap that your screenwriting seminars push. And it’s got this thing called “moral clarity.”

Since that’s an unfamiliar concept, I’ll give you a chance to Google it.

Yeah, Hollywood, moral clarity.  The bad guys are bad guys. As in the real world outside of the I-10/I-5/101 Freeway/Pacific Ocean box where you live your miserable, morally bankrupt lives, there’s no ambiguity. American warriors are the unambiguous heroes, and the people they hunt down are unambiguously evil.

There’s no bogus back story to the villains about how Americans were mean to them, or how their daddies didn’t hug them enough, or how global warming destroyed their petting zoo.

“Act of Valor” rejects the kind of value-free nonsense you love to inject into your crummy, unwatched flops to generate the cozy moral ambiguity that allows you to pretend that there is no such thing as right and wrong. Over-hyped, over-praised and just plain over productions like “Homeland” (and, in later years, “24″), I’m talking about you.

Read the whole thing. Kurt smacks Hollywood around pretty well in this piece...and rightfully so.