Mile 22

Mile 22

Starring Mark Wahlberg, Lauren Cohan, Ronda Rousey, John Malkovich

Directed by Peter Berg

 

Mark Wahlberg teams up again with director Peter Berg - after working with him on hits like "Lone Survivor", "Patriots Day" and "Deepwater Horizon" - so you already expect greatness between the two.  However, as things go, there's bound to be a dud when you work with someone as often as these two have, and "Mile 22" is their dud - which is unfortunate because they were planning on turning this into a trilogy, which now doesn't seem likely.

Walberg stars as Jimmy, a man who works for a strike team called Overwatch who's called on when diplomacy and the military fail.  Jimmy and his team are sent to Indonesia after a police officer named Noor surrenders himself, saying he has codes to reveal where missing shipments of a deadly toxic substance called cesium are located,  but will only give it after being transferred out of the country.

Jimmy and his team are tasked with taking Noor twenty-two miles to a waiting airplane, and along the way they get ambushed time and again by a shady terrorist organization bent on killing Noor before he gives the goods.

On paper, this looks to be an exciting action-packed thrill ride with deep character development and high stakes, but somewhere along the way they failed to deliver on the deep character development and high stakes, instead focusing almost solely on action-packed thrills.  While Wahlberg and company deliver some great shootouts, it's The Raid star Iko Uwais who truly shines as he showcases his intensive martial arts abilities to get himself out of several predicaments, with often bloody and violent outcomes. 

When it comes to the acting, it's rather subpar.  Wahlberg has strong anger issues and a deep sent of egotism, which is shown when he gives overly-long monologues at the same pace of that of John Moschitta Jr., where you're left wondering what he was saying.  The Walking Dead star Lauren Cohan sheds her country girl-next-door fascade and gives a terrific performance as a woman with a sailor mouth and deadly hand-to-hand combat skills, and besides Uwais is the bright shining star of the film.  Rhonda Rousey is criminally underused, as is John Malkovich as the team's leader, who spends his time in a room far apart from the action.

The story itself is...unusual, I guess is the best way to describe it.  It seems simple and easy, but then there's some surprises thrown in that seems to have been included at the last minute, like they thought "hey, we don't have enough twists and turns here, let's just throw this in and see how it goes."  It doesn't make sense, and it makes the team look like mere freshmen in a world of seniors, who get caught time and time again, and you wonder if this was an actual real-life team, how the heck they'd accomplish anything more than getting the President his favorite Starbucks drink.

Now it's time for the pros and cons of the film, first with the pros:  intense action, exciting martial arts moves by Iko Uwais, and Lauren Cohan's performance.  The cons include a muddied script that makes our heroes look like bumbling fools, Mark Wahlberg's annoying monologues, and the criminal under-use of talents like Rhonda Rousey and John Malkovich.

Overall, I would give Mile 22 a B-.