Movie review: Not much light in 'Zero Dark Thirty'

Rest easy, America. We might be under attack from anti-Western fundamentalists whose lack of interest in human life — even their own — means they can’t be reasoned with. We can still sleep easy at night: A hot redhead takes terrorism so personally that she’ll do whatever it takes to stop it. She got Osama bin Laden single-handedly.

That’s not exactly the message of “Zero Dark Thirty.” But it’s not that far off, either. Kathryn Bigelow’s highly anticipated film about the hunt for the al Qaeda leader is, as the opening credits inform us, “based on first-hand accounts of actual events.” But it is such a stereotypically Hollywood-ized version of those events that it veers awfully close to the laughable.