Dawn Patrol movie review & film summary (2015)
Scott Eastwood, last seen showing his pecs in "The Longest Ride," stars as a Marine named John. As the story opens, he is being marched across a desert at gunpoint while telling his attacker the story of how he wound up in this particular position. In the summer of 2008, he was an ordinary surf bum content to ride the waves off of Venice Beach with his brother, surfing ace Ben (Chris Brochu), and dad Trick (Jeff Fahey) while fighting off the Mexicans who dare to intrude their turf. Tensions are exacerbated when Ben's ex-girlfriend, Donna (Kim Matula), takes up with Miguel (Gabriel DeSanti), and he responds by drunkenly grabbing her away from Miguel and carting her down to the shoreline for what begins as a sexual assault and ends with a marriage proposal, while John smacks around Miguel a couple of times in the most low-key and apologetic manner possible.
Sure, this might leave you to think that Ben is a drunken jerk with rage issues but you would be wrong—he just wants to surf without having to deal with the surferazzi (yes, this is a term used in the film) or his pothead mother (Rita Wilson) who want to exploit his talents for money. Alas, not everyone is on his level of enlightenment because a couple of days later, he is found murdered on the beach. John is convinced that Miguel is responsible for the killing—he even saw the guy's car in the area just before finding the body—but when the police are unable to prove it or to even come up with his last name, John's grieving parents essentially demand that he "man up" and take matters into his own hands. After putting up what barely qualifies as token resistance, he goes about doing just that and, in news that will shock few of you, it all goes sideways from there.
"Dawn Patrol" is so rotten in so many ways that there is a temptation to look at it at first as some kind of demented deadpan spoof of films that celebrate grotesque macho codes above all else, and it is only with a gradual sense of horror that it becomes apparent that not only are we meant to take it seriously but that it thinks that it is saying something profound. The screenplay by Rachel Long & Brian Pittman is nothing more than a bunch of stupid incidents that make little sense, lead to a pathetically obvious surprise revelation and are presented via a flashback frame that is borderline torturous at times without adding anything of value to the proceedings. (Suffice it to say, director Daniel Petrie Jr. fails to lend the material the sort of élan or quiet dignity that he brought to such previous efforts as "Toy Soldiers" and "In the Army Now.")
