Navy Seals Blu-ray offers decent video and solid audio, but overall it's a mediocre Blu-ray release
The Navy's elite SEAL (SEa, Air and Land) squad is made up of the best of the best: supreme
warriors who take on dangerous missions no other fighting force would dare attempt. Sent to
rescue the crew of a U.S. aircraft held hostage by mideast terrorists, the SEALs know that their
skills will be put to the test. But when they discover that the terrorists have seized the plane's
arsenal of deadly Stinger missiles, they're thrust onto the frontlines of the battle of a lifetime.
More than any poster, more than its star power, more than any trailer, more certainly than
word-of-mouth, Navy Seals' most memorable "promotion" comes from a line in Kevin
Smith's Clerks as a video store patron expresses his excitement at finding a copy of the
("intellectually devoid") film
on the shelf. Navy Seals, by extension, is best known as a punch line in a far superior
movie, but that doesn't mean that it lacks as a standalone Action offering. Sure, it's
far-fetched,
predictable, clichéd, and probably the butt of more than a few jokes by America's real SEALs, but as
a straight
genre picture with no real purpose other than sheer brain-dead entertainment, it's not a bad way to
spend two hours.
Whatcha gonna do when they come for you?
A U.S. chopper crew is taken hostage after a failed attempt to rescue a damaged Kuwaiti freighter
on the high seas. With the surviving crew about to be executed, the Navy SEALs burst into the
room and save the day. Before returning to the extraction point, hotshot team member Lt. Dale
Hawkins (Charlie Sheen, Young Guns)
disobeys orders when curiosity gets the best of him, wondering what's behind a locked door.
There, he and teammate Graham (Dennis Haysbert, Major League)
discover a cache of stolen stinger missiles, surface-to-air merchants of death that make for a
powerful weapon in the hands of a determined terrorist. When team leader Lt. James Curran
(Michael Biehn, The Terminator) is
chided for failing to secure the weapons one way or another, they are sent back in to take them
out once and for all.
Navy Seals is a guns-blazing, machismo picture that not only covers all the standard
B-level Action movie clichés, but does so to such a complete level as to be a standard-bearer of
sorts for Action movie cheese. There's not an original character in the bunch; a few background
team members with but a few scattered lines don't much matter, but the team is made up of the
young gung-ho hotshot, the levelheaded Lieutenant, the family man, the medic, and the sniper.
It's G.I. Joe at a base level and the actors deliver performances that often take on the tone of a
Saturday morning military-themed cartoon. To that extent, Navy Seals never strays too
far from schoolboy-appropriate material, either. The "R" rating seems more obligatory to the
stereotypical Action movie style rather than truly necessary for what's put up on the screen;
there's plenty of shooting but
little-to-no Saving Private Ryan-style realistic violence. The occasional swear word
sneaks in, but there's nothing here that a few seconds worth of voiceover couldn't eliminate to
make this a PG-13 effort. The soft "R" rating isn't a detriment to the picture, merely an
observation that relays what audiences should expect from the material. Despite the lack of
blood, the action scenes are staged well enough, particularly the Beirut finale that does well to
place audiences in the midst of the building-to-building urban warfare. Such scenes are fun to
watch and
the lack of realism isn't a detriment for the casual viewer, even though most audience members
can see that the team's tactics would probably get them all killed in real-life military encounters
in a matter of minutes.
Still, Clerks is right. There are more brains in a fossilized Stegosaurus, but there's a place
for brainless Action flicks, and Navy Seals fits into its genre well enough that its place in
popular culture seems a slight bit unfair, particularly considering that there are far worse Action
movies out there. Where Navy
Seals truly falters is in its insistence in trying to be more than it is. A good quarter of the
movie seems superfluous and several scenes that attempt to add layers of depth to the
unremarkable characters simply get in the way of the action. Sure, any movie like this requires
some
exposition to flesh out the story and even some drama (done well enough here with the
obligatory death and subsequent funeral scene around the midpoint of the film), but it spends far
too much time on painting Charlie Sheen's character as a reckless hotshot or his and Michael
Biehn's wining-and-dining of
the practically
superfluous Joanne Whalley character. Sheen's character is the center of the story, and the ups
and downs of each mission revolve around the decisions he makes in the heat of the moment.
He's both the villain and the hero through the story arc, but that's a slightly more complex look
at what is required of an otherwise
one-dimensional character. At the end of the day, he cracks a few jokes and looks good enough
running around with a gun, which is all that matters in a movie like Navy Seals; any sort
of character development or foray into the action-reaction cause-and-effect of the character's
choices in battle are but secondary to the fact that they adequately move the film from act to
act.
Navy Seals swims onto Blu-ray with a 1080p, MPEG-2 encoded, 1.85:1-framed transfer.
While this isn't a top-notch, reference-grade transfer, there's no single egregious problem, either.
There's some blatant telecine wobble over the opening credits, and grain seems to come and go as it
pleases, but there's nothing too terribly bad to report with this one. Fine detail is adequate
throughout, though close-up shots of human faces reveal little texture and a somewhat smooth
appearance. The best detail comes in the final act in Beirut. The war-torn city lacks color,
consisting of varied shades of gray and all obscured by smoke, but the rubble on the ground and
damaged building façades tend to impress. Navy Seals looks consistently flat throughout.
Black levels are nice and dark, and flesh tones never waver too far towards an unnatural shade. A
watchable but underwhelming transfer, Navy Seals looks fine for a bargain basement
catalogue Blu-ray release.
Navy Seals' DTS-HD MA 5.1 lossless soundtrack fares a bit better than the video
presentation. Dialogue, though usually delivered with nary a hiccup, once or twice becomes garbled
underneath overzealous music and sound effects. The score plays neatly and without room for
complaint throughout. Ambience neither wholly impresses nor completely disappoints; an early
beachside scene features gentle waves rolling across the front of the soundstage, and at several
other junctures throughout the track picks up a fair sense of environmental immersion. Gunfire,
too, is delivered crisply. Ricochets bounce around the soundstage and shell casings rattle around on
the floor to decent effect. The highlight, however, comes from several shots of a .50 caliber sniper
rifle that pack a fair bit of heft and liven up the excitement another notch. The surround speakers
come alive during several firefights with gunshots cracking and explosions rocking the listening area
from all directions. Navy Seals is certainly not the end-all, be-all of Action movie lossless
soundtracks, but longtime fans should appreciate the increased oomph and presence the DTS track
provides.
Navy Seals' Blu-ray disc contains only the film's theatrical trailer (1:54) and additional
previews for The Terminator, Windtalkers, and
Mad Max. Disc two, a standard-definition DVD release of Navy Seals, also features
the film's trailer but no additional extras.
The butt of a popular culture joke, bathed in cliché, populated by stereotypes, and overly long,
Navy Seals survives a long list of negatives and remains a halfway decent genre picture
that's still entertaining at almost 20 years old. It's not Die Hard but it doesn't
have to be; as a mid-level Action movie it does its job well enough and while no one aspect of the
movie stands out, nothing really makes it look atrociously bad, either. MGM's Blu-ray title is
technically sound but sadly lacks in the supplemental section. Fans get a standard definition DVD
copy free of charge to go along with the photoshopped cover art that's a far cry from the nice
looking original poster art. Recommended for fans considering the disc's bargain-basement price
point.
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