Writer/director Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg re-team after 2016’s Deepwater Horizon for this film exploring the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings that comes off as exploitative versus well-intentioned.

Film as a medium often have a way of connecting people to real-life events that may seem abstract until they have a human face. That being said, Peter Berg’s Patriots Day largely fails by trying too hard to show us the human side of tragedy in all its viscera and loss.

Wahlberg plays Tommy Saunders, a fictional Boston police officer, who happens to represent the Boston Police on the day of the marathon. We follow various individuals throughout the day whose lives all intersect due to the bombing. From small-town Watertown Police Sergeant Jeffrey Pugliese (J.K. Simmons), to the bombers themselves, the Tsarnaev family (Alex Wolff, Themo Melikidze, and Melissa Benoist). The performances in the film are largely strong, down to John Goodman as Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis and Kevin Bacon as Richard DesLauriers, Special Agent in the FBI’s Boston field office.

The film, while largely a feel good about America/Boston piece, has some major issues that affect its quality. Wahlberg is largely regurgitating his past performances in films like Ted and The Departed as a comedic, loud-mouthed Bostonian. While intended to be a grounding, audience surrogate, the character is jarring — especially given its prominence in the film versus all the real life figures portrayed we meet throughout the rest of the film, along with their real world counterparts.

While great pains have obviously been taken to recreate the bombing in the film, down to using actual footage as much as possible, the actual recreation of the film is extremely grotesque and straight out of an exploitation film which is very jarring with the tone of the film. The effects, by The Walking Dead‘s Greg Nicotero and Howard Berger, are anatomically accurate and bloody, with dismembered pieces strewn about the landscape. This would be fine, if the rest of the film, didn’t alternate between a jingoistic demonization of the “otherness” of the bombers oscillating between the end of the film which becomes a documentary rehashing everything we’ve just seen depicted, minus Wahlberg’s fictional character.

Berg and Wahlberg are making a run of fictionalizing recent tragedies in film; which makes Patriots Day seem less a tribute and more of a rally to hit the screen first with their adaptation.