Hyena Road

I thought overall it was a good, almost great movie that could have used more subtitles. Started off slow, remained slow thru the middle, but really picked up at the end.

I did have some nitpicking tho. I've never been in battle, but don't you hope for the best and plan for the worst? Twice they went out and had no cover when they needed it.

Also, there were no other soldiers other then Canadian? The narration even mentioned that the airfield was a collection of different countries soldiers but they never mentioned or showed any other soldiers then Canadian, Afghanistan, Taliban, and militia?

And the love interest was kinda odd. They were supposed to be keeping it quiet, but were meeting out in the open, touching and holding hands out in the open, and someone even mentioned that everyone knew about it. It was supposed to pull at your heartstrings at the end and it did, but I would have been upset at the end even without it. If you're going to have it in the movie, at least end the movie with Jennifer and the child back in Canada!

Rating: 3.25* / 5* or 6.5 / 10

6.5 a movie to watch at some point when you really have nothing to do, have something in the background or something like that but you really don't miss anything if you don't watch it.

Something that seems to me to be a plus is that although it is an action/war movie, I think the action scenes are just right and necessary. There are movies of this genre that from the moment they start are pure confrontations and that's not bad, but the war goes further. This movie also deals with the planning and intelligence part, which I think adds a little more depth to the matter.

Among the things I didn't like are certain shots. I understand that they tried to give it a touch of realism by filming in real vehicles (helicopters for example) and giving the camera some agitation in certain confrontations, but they were really the shots that seemed the most shitty to me.

This last point has to be taken with a grain of salt and I risk being wrong but this movie is supposed to "happen", I don't know if it's "based on true events" or "inspired by true events", if it's inspired this point doesn't count since being "inspired" it doesn't have to be completely faithful to what happened and it gives a little more room for creativity but if it is "based" it should be more faithful to what happened and that's where the next point clashes me, which is, they gave several "PoV" (Point of view), sometimes they focused on one person and the story followed them, then another, then they added some shots of "the bad guys" and my problem with all this is, this is supposed to be a movie based on true events, how do you know what each person was doing at each moment? Including the "bad guys", I think it would have been better if they had followed just one person and not several like they did, after all, at the end of the movie you see who survives and who doesn't which further reinforces my point of "How do you know this happened like this? These characters died, it's not like they could have told you that themselves."

Was a pretty good movie if you like the realistic ones. The little shots of authenticity on the food, culture, combat, equipment was good. About my only gripe was two things- the shooting the IED's with rounds and the ending. You'd think they would've learned their lesson the first time that not having the air or ground QRF to help you out was asking for that ending. It was poor planning on their part but good writing on the writers, since I wasn't expecting them to [spoiler]basically kill everyone. [/spoiler] Of course that's not saying much since they literally only had one fire team of four out alone that was 20-30 minutes away from any sort of QRF. Overall though I think the movie lacked a strong narrative point which made it dry at times and a feeling of aimless. The clash between the Ghost and BDK held my attention but the resolution was definitely a bit unsatisfying.

Would only recommend this movie if you just want to see what combat in Afghanistan (in a dramatic setting as one fire team out alone against 30 was very unrealistic) was like or some of the culture.

I had hard times paying attention to this movie. Can't really describe why exactly, but I found this movie failing on several fronts. Had more potential.

film or documentary ? I did not know it wasn't a film when I started, but it's not a documentary neither... couldn't go through.