SEAL Team Six Sucks

Harvey Weinstein is trying to give President Obama an electoral boost with SEAL Team Six, a feature airing tonight on National Geographic about the assault on Osama bin Laden's compound. But critics had trouble staying awake:

• "As either propaganda or realist fiction SEAL Team Six is ineffective," writes Willa Paskin at Salon. "It’s on the level of those 'The army is just like a character-building video game!' enlistment ads you see before movies, simple-minded and, at most, superficially rousing."

• "Predictably, the filmmakers have chosen to use a mix of real and staged footage to tell the story," writes Mary McNamara at the LA Times. " Less predictably, and far less wisely, the staged portions include a series of expository 'interviews' with the principal characters, though who they are being interviewed by ... is never made clear."
• The combat scenes are pretty good, writes Tim Goodman at the Hollywood Reporter, "but with almost no emotional interest in these undeveloped characters, the movie feels more like it was tossed together in an effort to be first on any screen—small or large."
• Bucking the trend, Liz Raftery at TV Guide calls SEAL Team Six "a taut, entertaining" film with fascinating backroom scenes about political decision-making. What's more, "the film's purpose is to provide entertainment, not to advance a political agenda."

(More Seal Team Six stories.)