A Seal is a member of one of the US navy's elite acronymic Sea Air and Land units, and Uncle Sam has given his official seal of approval for Seals to perform in this hi-tech, high testosterone combat movie set variously in the Philippines, east Africa, Latin America, Mexico and Ukraine. Instead of the likes of Sly Stallone and Charlie Sheen strutting their stuff in dark glasses and camouflage gear, armed to the teeth with state-of-the-art weaponry, the genuine articles in Act of Valour go into the field, but are credited only under their given names or noms de guerre (Rorke, Sonny, Ray, Ajay, Weimy). The villains are of course played by actors from the racial archetypes section of central casting.
The Seals are a formidable bunch who've undergone every form of vigorous training available to man except a course at acting school, but in their brief domestic scenes with their dedicated, long-suffering wives they do well enough. They are steeped in military tradition, patriotic fervour and sacrifice, and twice there's talk of military dedication "running in the blood". Someone also makes a speech explaining how "a single twig will break, but a bundle of twigs is strong", a quote from the Indian warrior Tecumseh and a reference to the fasces, the birch rods surrounding an axe, which was the symbol of power and authority in the Roman empire and provided Italian fascism with its name in the 20th century. Unlike the swastika, the use of the fasces has not been discredited in the States.
Act of Valour has a scenario, presumably officially endorsed, in which a team of Seals confronts an international terrorist plot involving Filipinos, the Ukrainian mafia, al-Qaida and Hispanic drug cartels. Suicide bombers train to infiltrate the US wearing the latest form of deadly explosive vests that scatter hundreds of bullets followed by horrendous explosions. The targets include Los Angeles and Las Vegas. The shoot-outs are realistically staged, the body count is roughly one American to around 20 of their foes, and this being a propaganda picture on identical lines to those of the second world war, there's no room for any sort of respect for the enemy or any understanding of his motives. For this reason, though not for this alone, Act of Valour is a distasteful and foolish film, a recruiting poster that might well carry the slogan "Join the Navy, Travel the World and Kill People". We've come a long way from the early days of this century when the Pentagon arranged screenings of Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers so that US armed forces might learn something from it, especially on the issue of "how to win a battle against terrorism and lose the war of ideas".
