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MOVIE: Mile 22

STARRING: Mark Wahlberg, Lauren Cohan, Iko Uwais, John Malkovich, Ronda Rousey. RATING: MA 15+

REVIEWER: Leigh Paatsch

THE nicest thing you can say about Mile 22 is that this unashamedly ugly, ultra-violent thriller does not want to play nice at all.

Are you an action fan who has had it up to here with middling escapist fare that pulls the very punches it should be throwing? You might want to be booking your ticket right now.

A tonally erratic, yet relentlessly aggressive affair, Mile 22 is all impact, all the time.

If you can handle the rough stuff, one thing is for certain: you will not be bored for a nanosecond.

The premise is cut from thin, but durable race-against-time material.

There is this screw-loose US black-ops agent named Jimmy Silva (Mark Wahlberg), and he has a handful of hours to deliver a package from one side of an unnamed Asian metropolis to the other.

(If you’re wondering about the relevance of the title, well, that’s the non-metric length that will be spanned by the mission.)

Initially, Jimmy’s odyssey looks like a scrappy remix of the famous in-and-out-of-Mexico motorcade sequence from Sicario (albeit with shorter city blocks and far more unpredictable traffic patterns.)

Then our hero and his back-up team are cast out of their vehicles, and it soon becomes a case of every man (and woman) for themselves on some very mean streets indeed.

Their enemies are quite open in their pursuit of Silva and his unit, even though the Americans (wrongly, as it transpired) believe the fundamentals of diplomatic immunity should provide at least a certain level of cover.