Lone Survivor

Beautifully made but brutal and as gung ho as they come, Peter Berg's action movie is pure Viagra for anyone turned on by military hardware, soldier speak and noisy combat. Based on a true story, the film stars Mark Wahlberg, Emile Hirsch and Taylor Kitsch (a refugee from Berg's equally jingoistic Battleship) as members of a small Navy SEAL hit squad who are dropped deep behind enemy lines in Afghanistan to find and kill a top Taliban warlord. But when the mission is compromised, the SEALs find themselves under attack from 200 insurgents and forced to flee for their lives. The ferocious running firefight that ensues takes up a sizeable portion of the film's two-hour running time, as bullets fly, blood spurts, bones break and a band of brothers bonds. It's unrelenting stuff and rarely a pleasant watch, but those with a stomach for this kind of thing will find it hard to take their eyes off it.