Now in his third docudrama with director Peter Berg — after starring roles in “Lone Survivor” and “Deepwater Horizon” that showed less versatility than virtual interchangeability — Mark Wahlberg is not quite the hero of “Patriots Day.” Rather, he is one of many fungible moving parts that drive the story forward, like cogs in a well-oiled machine.
Part thriller, part police procedural and part documentary-style ticktock, Berg’s movie, which he wrote with Matt Cook (“Triple 9”) and Joshua Zetumer (2014’s “RoboCop”), retells the tale of the massive manhunt for the Boston Marathon bombers, using Wahlberg’s Beantown flatfoot Tommy Saunders as the furrowed yet ruggedly handsome face of the army of law enforcement officers that was mobilized after two homemade bombs exploded near the finish line of the 2013 marathon, killing three spectators and injuring hundreds.
Joining such real-life figures as FBI Special Agent Richard DesLauriers (Kevin Bacon), Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis (John Goodman), Watertown Police Sgt. Jeffrey Pugliese (J.K. Simmons) and Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick (Michael Beach), Wahlberg renders the composite Saunders as a kind of Everycop, an entirely fictional yet serviceable storytelling device that helps viewers follow the furiously focused search for brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev (Themo Melikidze and Alex Wolff) through its many convolutions.
“Patriots Day” starts slow and somewhat predictably, jumping between scenes that introduce us to Saunders, the bombers and some of their soon-to-be victims in the hours leading up to the race. This section of the film hews to a well-worn formula of intercutting snippets of mundane life with shots of the Tsarnaevs’ ominous yet creepily deadpan bomb prep, using shrapnel and explosives stuffed into ordinary pressure cookers that they carried to the site in backpacks.