written by Lea Carpenter
For years now, director Peter Berg has collaborated with Mark Wahlberg on dramas about American tragedies. Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon, and Patriots Day all took real-world events as their subject matter, with varied but generally positive critical reactions and widespread popularity. Clearly, Berg and Wahlberg have a comfortable relationship, so although the former previously failed to craft a successful summer blockbuster with 2012's Battleship, a new action film from the duo still had potential, especially given Wahlberg's continued box office success.
However, Mile 22 suggests that Berg should have stuck with what was working, as he struggles to find a story compelling enough to compensate for the lack of real-world inspiration. More importantly, the film features some shockingly bad editing, and lacks even a single visually coherent action scene, instead waiting not even a second between cuts. The basic responsibility of any action movie is to ensure the audience can follow the action, and in that sense, Mile 22 is perversely inept. Considering that fundamental failure, it hardly even matters that the film also has an unlikeable protagonist and terrible dialogue. All anyone wants from an action movie is clear, comprehensible action, and this film can't even deliver that.
James Silva (Mark Wahlberg) is a CIA officer who's tasked with leading a secret team called "Overwatch" to find some stolen nuclear cesium before it can hurt thousands of people. To do so, he must smuggle mysterious police officer Li Noor (Iko Uwais) out of his home country, because only Noor knows the access code which will reveal the location of the cesium.
The essential problem with Mile 22, which presents itself as an action thriller, is that the action scenes are nearly incomprehensible, featuring so many cuts that basic visual coherence is frequently sacrificed. It's not uncommon for a scene to have a cut every second, and while this does give the film a degree of energy, that relentless barrage of stimulus quickly becomes wearying, especially in the lengthy climax, wherein the lack of visual clarity transforms the film into a monotonous slurry of motion. This editing style may have been intended to serve some rhythmic purpose, but it only ever serves as a detriment to what could have otherwise served as a brutal B-movie.
It's particularly frustrating due to the casting of Uwais, who previously starred in The Raid and has made a name for himself as a skilled martial artist. His skill is apparent in the film's rare slivers of clarity, but it's frequently hard to tell who he's hitting. Individual takes are just way too short to provide a clear view of the choreography. In addition, the camera rarely moves to complement the performers' movements, instead shaking erratically, making the action all the more difficult to decipher. Underneath all of the choppy editing, there may very well be a half-decent action movie, but in its current form it's far too difficult to actually see.
The film's other distinguishing quality is the character of Silva, whose abusive demeanour is only explained in the vaguest terms. There's nothing to the character beyond the surface-level aggression, and in Wahlberg's hands he's an unmemorable but distinctly unpleasant presence, shouting at his coworkers and generally babbling incoherently in a way which is presumably meant to be impressive. Generally, it's insufferable, and even if the movie's thesis about needing monsters to fight monsters were fresh, it's undercut by the simple fact that Silva not only fails frequently, but at times even has to justify his own failures. For all of his bluster, he doesn't seem that much more competent than anyone else. That's not even getting into the vague attempts to explain his demeanour, which tactlessly imply mental illness or disability without bothering to explore it in detail.
To make matters worse, the dialogue is uniformly terrible; Silva may gain the most incoherent monologues, but every character is defined by a sociopathic aggression, and the cast spends much of the film loudly cursing at each other. Lauren Cohan plays a character with a minor arc about dealing with her divorced husband and their children, but it's largely disconnected from the main plot, and it suffers just like everything else from the film's overwrought, machismo-laden dialogue. Other characters are moderately more interesting, and Uwais in particular gives a charismatic performance, but these are drowned underneath bad editing and bad dialogue. Everything here is brutal and aggressive, and while there's a hypothetical pleasure to be gained from that, it's too self-serious to be fun, and the poorly-edited action scenes don't provide the necessary payoff.
If there's one place it succeeds, it's in sustaining some degree of tension. The stakes are simple and clear, and the plot moves forward at a fast pace. Berg provides some competent parallel cutting between the different layers of action, and it's this which, every once in a while, makes the film not just watchable but even modestly engaging. It only reaches that watchable state in brief slivers, specifically the moments between character beats and action beats, where the generic but serviceable plot is allowed to just play out, unburdened by the film's most obnoxious qualities. But Mile 22 doesn't sustain this bland competence for long before dovetailing again into obnoxious babble or incoherent action.
In a film which champions an abusive sociopath as a necessary instrument of national security, it's perhaps not surprising that its tone leans towards jingoism. The film supposedly takes place in Indonesia, but the title card introducing the setting merely says "Southeast Asia," which is indicative of the film's generally dismissive attitude to non-American countries. The Indonesian government is dismissed as corrupt and murderous, whereas the Russians - who appear briefly at certain points - are characterized as a powerful existential threat. The film also attempts to appropriate iconography from current American politics, but this is meaningless at best and odiously fear-mongering at worst.
Again, that vague amorality and generic simplicity could have made for a decently entertaining B-movie, but the actual action - the supposed payoff of everything else in the film - is far too indecipherable to excite. Mile 22 could have gotten away with being loud, obnoxious, and meat-headed. It could have gotten away with being bloodthirsty and politically dubious. It might even have gotten away with its hateful, stupid protagonist. But without coherent action, there's no payoff. An action film without even competent action is a film without a point, and all of the film's other flaws are magnified when the supposed centrepiece falls so flat. And the result is a frequently excruciating viewing experience.
3/10
+ Keeps the stakes simple.
+ Maintains a fast pace.
+ Uwais is reasonably charismatic.
- Horrible editing makes action scenes incomprehensible.
- Unpleasant and uninteresting protagonist.
- Overwrought dialogue.
Thank you to my Patreon supporters:
Todd Throndson
VioletWisp
Your donations are greatly appreciated.
Support me on Patreon!
No comments:
Post a Comment