Mile 22

photo courtesy of criminalelement.com

SPOILER-FREE REVIEW

     Mile 22 stars Mark Wahlberg as special agent James Silva, a member of an elite task force called “Overwatch.” Along with his team (Lauren Cohan, Ronda Rousey), Silva is responsible for escorting an Indonesian defector (Iko Uwais) 22 miles from the U.S. embassy to a military transport for evacuation to the States. Unfortunately for Silva, the corrupt Indonesian government will stop at nothing to prevent their escape.   

     With Mile 22, director Peter Berg produces a near-complete creative failure. The movie’s premise holds some potential: “behind enemy lines” could easily make for a hard-hitting, violent action flick, and the whole idea of “Overwatch”—a specialized, last resort black ops unit—carries a certain (modest) level of intrigue. But Mile 22 seems determined to undermine its own potential at every turn.

photo courtesy of variety.com

     Firstly, and most egregiously, chaotic editing turns Mile 22 from an uninspired action film into an incoherent one. It’s hardly the first action movie with choppy fight sequences or excessive shaky cam, but Mile 22 takes these techniques to the extreme, where scenes are diced up so haphazardly that the actual on-screen talent (including Iko Uwais, an Indonesian martial artist known for exceptional fight choreography in movies like The Raid) gets lost in the confusion. Certain scenes—otherwise serviceable—become downright incomprehensible. Even casual dialogue scenes receive the same treatment; rather than—heaven forbid!—show Wahlberg’s face swiveling from one character to the next, the editing cuts that wasted screen-time and charges forward to the next shot.

     The movie suffers from narrative troubles, too. Wahlberg’s Silva, ostensibly the main protagonist, is exceptionally (if believably) unlikeable. He spends a good deal of his time lecturing other characters with a considerable degree of condescension, and he doesn’t even have the decency to do it amusingly (a la Hugh Laurie’s Dr. House or Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock). Instead, he berates people, and sometimes they berate him back, and every so often the movie plays it for laughs. Only rarely do his antics actually merit a laugh. Usually, the audience settles for watching one of the supporting characters shrug him off with a comment like, “What’s this guy’s problem?”

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     And Silva’s arrogance carries over into the movie at large. It’s a highly patronizing affair. Mile 22 wants desperately to convince you that it, like its cutting-edge black ops unit, is several steps ahead of you. In this respect, the movie hearkens back to Now You See Me, another movie that mistakes fast scripting and chaotic editing for smart scripting and clever editing. And as in that film, the only real trick to Mile 22 is that underneath all its rapid-fire dialogue and high-minded ideas, there’s very little substance at all.

TRAILER

Watch the trailer here. 

photo courtesy of journaltimes.com