The film wears its intentions to pander to the shallowest kind of xenophobic patriotism on its camo sleeves, but the real ideology of Act of Valor has less to do with neo-conservativism or neo-liberalism, and more to do with video games: the narrative structure doesn't even try to hide it. C.O.: "SEALs! The terrorists are in Mexico now!" C.O.: "SEALs! There are terrorists in Africa!" COMMANDING OFFICER: "SEALs! You have to go to South America to save a CIA agent! Here, in brief, is the plot of Act of Valor: The results aren't as bad as you might expect, largely for the reason that the filmmakers either by previous intent or immediately upon getting their performers on set have tailored the film to require as little capital-A Acting as is remotely feasible and still call the thing that results a narrative film.
And he handed it to one of the co-writers of 300. This was a project build from the ground up to serve the concept of SEALs playing SEALs, presumably because an executive decided that hardcore pro-military conservatives haven't had a project tailored to their interests lately, and there was money to be made. It is, I want to stress, painfully obvious that this was not about key grip-turned-screenwriter Kurt Johnstad coming up with a story about Navy SEALs, giving it to directors Scott Waugh and Mike "Mouse" McCoy, and during pre-production, somebody hit upon the obvious-in-retrospect idea that there could be no better verisimilitude than put real American warriors in the film. Unless some of them actually let themselves die in order to make the movie, which would be even more badass than SEALs are typically held to be. Navy SEALs, but not ones based on themselves.
Newest example: Act of Valor, a movie that exists for the single reason that active duty U.S. That wasn't invented by the Italians, of course, but it was certainly legitimised by Bicycle Thieves and it has resulted in some of the most embarrassing performances in cinema history in the six-plus decades since then. Sometimes, I wonder if it would be worth throwing out the entire corpus of Italian cinema from De Sica to Antonioni to Argento, if such a dire price would save us from Neo-Realism's most disreputable legacy: non-actors playing major characters in movies for the "authenticity" it brings.
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