"Act of Valor" Should Have Had a Different Title: "Call of Duty: The Movie"

I just caught this past February's "Act of Valor" streaming on Netflix.  This was that war movie starring real active Navy SEALs in the lead roles.

It starts off with the team on a mission to recover a kidnapped CIA agent.  At first I thought this was the entire plot, but thankfully I was wrong.  After rescuing the kidnapped agent, the men go up against a religious supremacist trying to bring suicide bombers into the United States.  It ends up being a decent enough plot for what it's worth from Kurt Johnstad (co-writer of "300"), but it's not Oscar material by any stretch of the imagination.
The entire time, I couldn't shake the feeling that I was watching the ultimate propaganda film or Navy recruiting video.  There were a few badass POV shots that felt like the audience was right in the middle of the action but by the end I felt like I had been playing "Call of Duty" for two hours.  In fact I probably could have gotten just as good of a story, if not better, from doing just that.
I even started to notice some of the film aesthetics became "Call of Duty"-esque during the climax.  The POV shots start to feel and look like the screen of a first-person shooter.  SPOILER: There was even a scene where Chief gets badly wounded and we get a few sequences from his perspective.  A filter of red light becomes apparent, and you can even hear a pulse in the background.  During this time, Chief also reloads his handgun and shoots one last assailant.  Looks and sounds an awful lot like the "Last Stand" feature from COD if you ask me.
SPOILER: But I must say, "Act of Valor" concludes nicely with a memorial service and the reading of a letter from a deceased father to the son he never gets to meet.  It pulls the heartstrings after nearly two hours of nonstop, adrenaline-pumping action.
Overall I'd say "Act of Valor" is just okay.  The action is entertaining enough, and the SEALs do a good job of playing themselves.  But it all seemed too much for me.  If the directors had set down their Xbox controllers and focused more on the characters & plot, the film would have been much better for it.  2.5 of 4 stars.