13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi Review

This is the closest Bay gets to discipline. The night siege of the annex is shot with a restraint he never shows elsewhere, sustained takes, mortar rounds walking onto a rooftop, tracer fire that lets you read the geography of a compound, and long silences where nothing happens and the waiting does the work. John Krasinski is well cast against type and James Badge Dale is better, and the contractors are drawn as tradesmen rather than heroes, calling their families and complaining about supply.

The evasions are total. The film picks the most politically loaded night of the previous decade and then refuses to engage with any of the questions around it, using a station chief as a stand in for institutional failure and leaving the policy offscreen, which is not neutrality so much as a way to have it both ways. The Libyan characters are indistinguishable from one another and largely undifferentiated from the attackers. Effective as a siege picture, empty as an account.