Review: Mile 22

 

Overseen remotely by John Malkovich, the film concerns a team of top-secret U.S. Government tactical command ops led by Mark Wahlberg, and also featuring Lauren Cohan and Ronda Rousey. The main plot centres around Iko Uwais as a rogue foreign agent seeking asylum in exchange for valuable information. It’s the Overwatch team’s job to lead Uwais to safety and uncover the location of materials for a ‘dirty’ bomb. Easier said than done.

 

Peter Berg has made some clunkers in his career as filmmaker (“Very Bad Things”, “Battleship”), but seems to have a good batting average when teaming with star Mark Wahlberg (“Lone Survivor”, “Deepwater Horizon”, “Patriots Day”). Unfortunately, this confusing and irritating mess from 2018 represents their first failure together. The opening sequence is tense and exciting, and star of “The Raid” Iko Uwais gets a plum role in which he doesn’t disappoint. He’s about the only thing that doesn’t, with Mark Wahlberg dialling up the obnoxiousness to such a level that you’d swear he was making a sequel to “The Other Guys”. At least that film was funny and entertaining. It’s easily Wahlberg’s worst performance since the otherwise fine ‘re-imagining’ of “Planet of the Apes”, where he went too far in underplaying it.

 

Scripted by debutant Lea Carpenter (an author and contributing editor to Esquire magazine), it’s a mixture of Schwarzenegger’s not-bad “Sabotage” and a latter-day Steven Seagal ‘Special Ops’ cheapie. The lack of coherence is definitely akin to the latter. Meanwhile, Berg’s directorial style unfortunately matches his lead star’s performance: Obnoxious in the extreme. Monumentally aggravating shaky-cam, quick intercutting between dialogue scenes, rapid-fire dialogue, lots of arguing and technical jargon being thrown out etc. After 25 minutes of struggling to find my bearings, I just couldn’t get into this one. Also, after that opening sequence the film slows down far too much for such a short film. Aside from the aforementioned Uwais and a well-cast but underused Ronda Rousey (who are the only people here who know how to shut the hell up), the performances here are terrible. In addition to Wahlberg, we have Lauren Cohan believing that all she needs for her ‘Tough Chick starter kit’ turn is to swear a lot. She’s even more forced in the action genre than Scarlett ‘Stock Action Poses and Robotic Face’ Johansson. John Malkovich can usually be counted upon to do something interesting, but here one is distracted by two things 1) What the fuck has up and died on top of his head?, and 2) What is John Malkovich doing in something like this? “Con Air” is one of my favourite 90s movies, but playing the vaguely defined overseer of the protagonists doesn’t seem anywhere near the best fit for his (admittedly varied) acting talents. He’s well and truly giving a pay-check performance in this one. Even Vietnamese-born Sam Medina, such an effective smarmy henchman in the two recent “Kickboxer” films, has seen better days, here cast as the even more vaguely defined bad guy. He’s just some guy with some other guys shooting at our protagonists in the last quarter of the film.

 

Getting back to Uwais, he also manages to score in the action department even though Berg and his camera department do their best to obfuscate as much of the action as possible so that no one has any fun at any time whatsoever. Berg certainly has no clue how to frame martial-arts action. Still, look for a particularly nasty bit where Uwais drags a guy’s head across the door frame of a car with broken glass. Ouch. Ronda Rousey doesn’t get much to do here, but when she’s on screen, she makes ever second count so much as one can when the filmmaker is pretty much actively working against you.

 

Edited with an inch of its life, irritating, often confusing. This obnoxious film never gets off the ground. That’s a shame because Iko Uwais gives a solid performance playing the only interesting character in the film. He also kicks arse in the action department on the too few occasions he’s called upon to do so. However, it’s probably not the ‘breakout’ Hollywood role he’s looking for I’m afraid. The director doesn’t present him properly on screen from an action perspective. Director Berg should also be raked over the coals for instructing star Wahlberg to go so far over the top here. Replace Berg with an action specialist like Isaac Florentine, cast Scott Adkins in the Wahlberg role and this might’ve had a chance. As is, it’s hard work made out of something very, very simple. Sound and fury signifying not much I could make logistic sense of.

 

Rating: C-