13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi review – Michael Bay plays politico for the Fox News crowd

Midway through Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, interrupting its bizarre mix of war pornography and dour isolationist posturing, there’s a shoehorned moment of mawkishness. Jack (John Krasinski) is one of the ex-armed forces contractors taking a babysitting job as security to CIA specialists halfway around the world. He’s Skyping with his wife and daughters, and if that doesn’t telegraph what motivates him to stay alive, he learns he’s going to be a father again. This most human moment in the 144-minute film raises the stakes, and does double duty as product placement, set as it is at a McDonald’s drive-thru, Happy Meals references flavouring the wholesome family sentiment. 13 Hours is as American as microwaved apple pie.

Detailing the 2012 attack on a US diplomatic (and, later, espionage) compound in Benghazi, Libya, in all its thudding, bloody brutality, 13 Hours is an extraordinary artifact, a film that makes you long for the subtlety of something like Black Hawk Down. It stars a half dozen interchangeable bearded, buff men with names like Boon, Tig, Rone, Bub and Oz. One looks a bit more like Metallica’s James Hetfieldthan the others and another is black, but the rest are a clone army. They are guns for hire for a secret CIA base run by pansy twerps from Harvard and Yale who barely know how to wipe their own asses without checking a rulebook. The nasally egghead chief (David Costabile) explains to newcomer Jack that flexing too much muscle where the natives can see isn’t a good idea. But just outside the window, one of the boys is yawping and dragging enormous blocks of concrete around in his short shorts like this is some kind of Steve Reeves picture. Behind him, a bleating pen of sheep, defenceless to slaughter.

An off-the-books facility in an unstable country means the enemy is everywhere. Benghazi is a shithole where they sell RPGs in the street. “They’re all bad guys until they’re not”, and “you can’t tell the good guys from the bad”, we’re warned. Muezzins lead the call to prayer and shifty-looking brown people scowl from behind their glasses of tea. But listen, we already know they hate us. The real enemy in 13 Hours is more insidious – those half-assed pencil pushers. If they’d just get out of the way and let a soldier do his job, we’d finally accomplish something and make America great again.