Ten minutes into "Act of Valor", I could practically hear the voice of Homer Simpson in my head, delivering his own critique of the movie: "Ooh, propatainment!"
Boasting the full cooperation of the Pentagon and featuring actual United States special-forces operatives playing all the lead characters who "defend our freedom from terror and tyranny," it's hard to call "Act of Valor" anything but propaganda; indeed, the film was originally floated by stuntmen-turned-directors Mike McCoy and Scott Waugh as a high-octane recruitment short, before it got bumped up into a feature-length fiction film.
With its heli-dropped SOCR boats on a remote Costa Rican river, mid-Pacific rendezvous with nuclear submarines, covert monitoring of a Somali desert, and high-tech gadgets such as the hand-launched MQ-9 Reaper drone or the SDV Mk8 mini-sub, "Act of Valor" is nothing if not an advertisement for the global projection of American lethal force. After seeing this flick, even Megatron would think twice about his evil plans for global domination.