Tag: Mark Wahlberg

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Arts

Action fizzle: Mile 22 builds it up but cannot deliver

In Mile 22, Mark Wahlberg leads a special ops mission to save a defector but fails to save the movie’s plot. Photo courtesy STX FILMS

If Peter Berg was more interested in emulating Michael Mann than Michael Bay, Mile 22 might be something. An international thriller based around getting a high-value asset from point A to point B through extremely hostile territory within a very narrow window should be exciting from beginning to end, a claustrophobic story in the open air where the moments between the action sequences are just as tense as the fights and shootouts. Instead, what we get is a jumbled, unfocused, visual mess that wastes its potential and is still somehow overlong at only 94 minutes.

The story follows a special ops team led by James Silva (Mark Wahlberg) that is tasked with transporting a defector, the mysterious Li Noor (Iko Uwais), to safety as his former (unnamed) nation’s intelligence agency spares no expense or bullet trying to take him down. Noor’s bargaining chip is that he has a self-destructing disc containing the location of several missing chemical weapons caches, and only he knows the password—and that he has a knack for making it out of no-win situations alive. His demand for this code is safe passage and asylum in the US. Silva and his team (featuring Ronda Rousey and Lauren Cohan) have to escort him 22 miles to the extraction point, where a military plane will wait for exactly 10 minutes after landing. If they fail, everyone dies and the weapons go to the highest bidder.

It’s a solid premise (if reminiscent of 16 Blocks) that’s taken down by—well, everything about the movie. First, and most disappointing, is a failure to make anything close to spatial sense in a film where the set pieces are specifically designed around the use of space: a safe house that’s been compromised, an apartment complex filled with danger at every turn, and navigating tight city streets where every motorcyclist may be armed. Neither the camera nor the editing allow you to see what’s actually happening before cutting to three different angles of the same event—a telltale sign that the editing was used to cover up either bad action choreography or bad cinematography. Even the gunplay is bad, and one shootout in particular feels like they tried to recreate the heist from Heat but only had one afternoon to film.

You may recognize Iko Uwais from The Raid films, where his skill as a physical performer first caught the world’s attention. Watching him take down a room full of baddies should be a delight, but the editing doesn’t even let you see where the punches land. Berg puts him back in an apartment complex and wastes the potential for homage with the inability to properly direct martial arts.

The incoherent action fails to hold it all together, leaving the story to die on the vine. Wahlberg’s rapid-fire delivery is meant to amplify some undiagnosed psychological condition, but the result is just Silva coming off as an insufferable prat who you really don’t want to spend 90 minutes with. Rousey, a professional fighter, is given a gun and lots of dialogue, but strangely does not fight. Cohan brings a lot to her character and could have been the saving grace had the story centered more on her character than Wahlberg’s. John Malkovich, one of the great go-big-or-go-home actors of our time, is left to do nothing but remotely feed intel to Wahlberg while wearing the worst hairpiece on a great performer since Robert Duvall’s Tom Hagen. Furthermore, the omission of where exactly this takes place beyond “Southeast Asia”—not even a fictional country is named—comes off as cowardly and noncommittal.

The ending is clearly attempting to set up a franchise. Don’t let them. Skip it.

Mile 22

R,  94minutes; Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX, Violet Crown Cinema

Playing this week

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema

377 Merchant Walk Sq., 326-5056

Alpha, BlacKkKlansman, Christopher Robin, Crazy Rich Asians, The Meg, Mission Impossible: Fallout

Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX

The Shops at Stonefield, 244-3213  

Alpha, Ant-man and The Wasp, BlacKkKlansman, Christopher Robin, Crazy Rich Asians, Death of A Nation, Dog Days, Hotel Transylvania 3, Incredibles 2, Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again, The Meg, Mission Impossible: Fallout, Pandas, The Spy Who Dumped Me

Violet Crown Cinema

200 W. Main St., Downtown Mall, 529-3000

American Animals, BlacKkKlansman, Blindspotting, Christopher Robin, Crazy Rich Asians, Eighth Grade, Leave No Trace, McQueen, The Meg, Sorry to Bother You, The Spy Who Dumped Me, Three Identical Strangers, Won’t You Be My Neighbor?

Categories
Arts

Movie review: Patriots Day overlooks the heart of the matter

In Patriots Day, Mark Wahlberg plays a composite character in pursuit of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombers. CBS Films

Patriots Day is a reductive, insulting, dishonest bit of emotional manipulation that bullies its audience into withholding criticisms out of fear that they will be taken as insults against the heroic people of Boston who came together in the wake of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. No, director Peter Berg and co-producer/star Mark Wahlberg do all the insulting on their own with a reductive, pandering, self-congratulatory piece of exploitation that casts aside real people to vaunt the accomplishments of a fictional cop who does not even exist. So much for being dedicated to the everyday heroes.

Patriots Day
R, 133 minutes
Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX, Violet Crown Cinema

Before we proceed with the rest of the review, one point needs to be made clear. Despite what some are saying, there is nothing inherently exploitative in making a film about the bombing and its aftermath. It is not “too soon,” and as long as art requires money to produce, there is nothing intrinsically hypocritical about selling tickets to a film that deals with heavy subjects. This sort of thinking led the world to dismiss Janet Reitman’s excellent investigation, “Jahar’s World,” for Rolling Stone and should not automatically be used as convenient ammo against Patriots Day. Its sins are much too serious for us to resort to potshots.

In the name of fairness, let’s lead with the good. Patriots Day presents itself as a procedural, following the series of events just before, during and in the week following the attack. Possibly the best aspect of the film is its use of real figures—Boston Police Commissioner Ed Davis (John Goodman), Watertown Police Sergeant Jeffrey Pugliese (J.K. Simmons), FBI special agent Richard Des- Lauriers (Kevin Bacon) and others. Berg follows the action from several points of view, including Sean Collier (Jake Picking), the MIT officer shot and killed by the Tsarnaevs, and Dun Meng (Jimmy O. Yang), whose car was stolen by the attackers. We even follow Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev with glimpses into the elder brother’s domineering behavior toward his impressionable and passive sibling.

When the film focuses on the intense minutiae of police work or spending time with people living their lives with no knowledge of the events they are about to be thrust into, it often works. The carjacking scene alone, in which the Tsarnaevs reveal their paranoid and conspiratorial mindset while Meng attempts to play along so as not to anger his abductors while also planning his escape, could have been its own film. A scene in which an interrogator (Khandi Alexander) grills Tamerlan’s wife is truly riveting and possibly the best single-scene performance of the year.

So where does Wahlberg fit into all of this, you may be asking? He plays Tommy Saunders, a composite character who never existed yet manages to be at the finish line at the time of the explosion, tells the FBI what’s what, pursues the bombers into Watertown, inspects the boat where Dzhokhar was eventually found, then shakes hands with David Ortiz before a Dropkick Murphys song plays over the credits. Berg, Wahlberg and company felt creating this caricature of a man was more worth their time than to acknowledge the existence of non-uniformed heroes like Carlos Arredondo, the famed cowboy- hat-donning activist and first responder who can be seen in videos running directly into the chaos before the smoke has even cleared. Berg fixates on Saunders as he guides ambulances full of EMTs whom we never meet and victims who are often not named until the end.

There is a film to be made about this subject, and Berg sometimes proves it with the occasional scene that holds together. But in the end, Patriots Day is not dedicated to any real heroes, but to self-parody and fictional authority figures.

Playing this week

Regal Stonefield 14 and IMAX
The Shops at Stonefield, 244-3213

A Monster Calls, The Bye Bye Man, Fences, Hidden Figures, La La Land, Live By Night, Moana, Monster Trucks, Passengers, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Sing, Singin’ in the Rain, Sleepless, Underworld: Blood Wars, Why Him?

Violet Crown Cinema
200 W. Main St., Downtown Mall, 529-3000

Fences, Hidden Figures, La La Land, Live by Night, Manchester by the Sea, Passengers, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Silence, Sing