Badass Army: As one would expect, the film is all about portraying the Navy SEALs in this light.

Band of Brothers: The relationship between Bandito Platoon, and by extension, the rest of the SEALs.

Art Shift: The scenes involving professional actors feature steady shots and long cuts while even non-action scenes involving SEALs feature more handheld shots and quick cuts note since they're not actors and the movie has to work around how long they were able to stay in character and say their lines.

Plus the truck serves passionfruit-flavored ice cream like it's an everyday thing, but passionfruit is rare in the country to the point of being exotic. The mere presence of the truck should have aroused suspicions rather than excitement.

They don't have ice cream trucks in the Philippines, just ice cream carts and sidecars.

They're also identified as 'Filipinos' from a distance because of their Islamic faith and nothing else. The terrorist mooks also have Christian or Western names and only speak Filipino (aka Tagalog), the national language and more akin to the Western-colonized majority-Christian population instead of the Malay and Arab-influenced Muslim minority.

The Philippines has a history of radical Islamic terrorism, fair enough - but it's quite a stretch that such terrorists could operate on American soil, being tied up in conflicts with the Philippine military itself.

This had some Filipinos and Filipino-Americans up in arms over the implication that the Philippines was mostly a radical Muslim nation despite having the only Christian majority population in Southeast Asia (due to about 450 years of colonialism) and very close ties to the United States (who colonized them for five decades, after four centuries under Spain) as well as other inaccuracies.

Artistic License – Geography: The terrorist mooks are Filipinos from the Philippines.

Chief's body armor is the only thing that keeps him from being killed outright by Shabal.

However, they later wear their armor on the raids into Mexico: LT's vest keeps him from being killed by an RPG-7 (with a dud warhead), and helps absorb the blast from the grenade he jumps on, mortally wounding him instead of outright death. Armor Is Useless: Played with Chief's crew skip armor when rescuing Morales, since it's too heavy to swim with.The surnames of Bandito Platoon are only noted in the novelisation.All There in the Manual: Bandito Platoon, the designator for the protagonists, is only used in supplementary materials.Affably Evil: For a weapons and drugs trafficker who has no issues with letting his men brutally kill and torture CIA agents, Christo is a remarkably reasonable, polite, friendly, educated, and soft-spoken man.Adaptation Expansion: The novelization, which expands further on the characterisation of Bandito Platoon, and provides alternative scenarios to certain scenes in the movie.

Act of valor based on a true story