*Originally written September 25th, 2018*
Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg have come together to make some of the most entertaining Hollywood films about real life disasters in recent years, so I was pretty interested in them teaming up for a fictional action film. Sadly, the results are for from great. In fact it's a completely disaster that wastes any potential it had.
Mile 22 is a complete mess on all fronts. A jumbled mess of poor editing decisions, horrific performances and laughably bad dialogue. I never saw this coming. At the very least I expected a throwaway action film in the vein of Olympus/London Has Fallen or American Assassin or another genuinely thrilling film from duo. I didn't even get anywhere close to that.
I was more reminded of David Ayer's Sabotage, which I kind of appreciated for its unhinged brutality and utter obnoxiousness of douchebaggery. Mile 22 suffers from that same problem of a completely unlikable cast, but at least Sabotage had a decent Arnie performance, well shot action and an engaging mystery at the centre of it.
I could not get over how irritating Mark Wahlberg was in this. His character is a maniac. Talking like he's done 4 grams of coke in less than 5 minutes and does not shut the fuck up. Every moment of dialogue with another character feels like in a video game when you skip through the dialogue and only hear snippets of the conversation. It's barbarically annoying and failed to make me take in what anyone was saying. Then Wahlberg's character had a tick of snapping an elastic band round his arm (Which I do too) as a way of dealing with stress or anxiety.
That's pretty much all we learn of Wahlberg's character through the entire run-time, which is only 90 minutes, so they blast us with his entire backstory during the opening credits, which was just such a cheap and lazy way of doing things that I'd pretty much checked out already.
The rest of Wahlberg's special ops team fare the very same. Completely underdeveloped with no personality of their own. Aside from Lauren Cohan's messy and unnecessary divorce subplot (Which I can only imagine was added to make this thing stretch out to a marketable run-time), I could not tell you a single thing about this team. Ronda Rousey is utterly atrocious, with strange and stilted delivery, making me nearly burst out laughing at every attempt of her "Acting". A problem with not bothering to get you attached to these characters, is that when they start dying and they get their "Hero" death moments, you really don't care and these explosive death moments are just met with a collective shrug.
The minor highlight is within The Raid's Iko Uwais, who seems to have a hard time working with English material, but always manages to exceed when it comes to all the martial arts stuff. He's one of the few bright spots of Mile 22 and I hope he continues to get roles in bigger stuff that deserves his practical skills.
It's a shame that Uwais's martial arts skills are utterly tarnished by some of the worst editing I've seen in a Hollywood film since Taken 3. There are flashes of excellence in the action and there is some really gnarly stuff here (It earns its rare 18 rating that we don't get enough of these days), but it's hard to enjoy when they decide to add 6 different cuts into a mere second of footage. It's so disorienting at makes things so hard to follow and some of later action scenes did such a poor job of spacial awareness that I had an awful time figuring out where everyone was in the area.
I could argue that I had a good time with Mile 22 though. It is so gun-ho, batshit and insane with its poor script and dialogue that I was on the edge of my seat with what utter nonsense was going to happen next. And in that way I was pleasantly surprised, just when I thought the film couldn't get any worse, it just managed to top itself, again and again. Even making way for the second best twist of the year, right behind Den of Thieves. It even sets up a sequel in a similar way. The only difference is that Den of Thieves is actually going to get to tell the rest of its story, no chance in hell will Mill 22 get to.
God bless cinema. It's both alive and dead, while Mark Wahlberg and Peter Berg are just dancing around in the dried out hollow corpse of cinema to make garbage like this. Good luck next time, guys. I know you have better in you.
3/10 Dans
Mile 22 is out now in cinemas in the UK
Watch the trailer below:
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