The best thing that can be said about 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi is that the words “Hillary Clinton” don’t appear anywhere in it. The new Michael Bay movie depicts the 2012 attack of Libyan militants on two American compounds in the city of Benghazi, and to Bay’s credit, he doesn’t try to weave in a broad conspiracy plot or any political intrigue.
This is a relatively mean and lean (well, as lean as 144 minutes can be) action movie with tons of pyrotechnics and almost zero context. We simply see what happened during those 13 particular hours: shooting and shouting and grown men with beards being incrementally covered in dirt, sweat, blood, shrapnel, and honor…