Wahlberg plays Angry intel officer
International spying takes a lot of effort and plenty of running around, apparently
Mile 22 is Mission: Impossible on crack. No, wait. Make that amphetamine.
Adding another entry to their oeuvre of sadistic films in the same patriotic vein (Lone Survivor and Patriots Day), Mark Wahlberg and Peter Berg have collaborated on a project presumably intended to prompt audience members to rise from their cinema seats and chant, “U!S!A!” in repetition.
Jimmy Silva (Wahlberg) is an animated, angry intel officer whose rapidly told backstory in the opening minutes of the film reveals a career path that has led him to the most badass black ops team ever. How badass? It’s headed by “Mother” (John Malkovich).
Once a hyperactive child prodigy, Wahlberg lost his entire family at a young age, and so his hyper-intelligence combined with unresolved psychological issues make him a perfect fit for the sociopathic where-you-goto-die undercover realm of U.S. intelligence.
Wahlberg ’s signature tic as Silva is impulsively flicking a yellow rubber band around his wrist to self-soothe, but it doesn’t seem to help much. Anger, as it turns out, is a helpful emotion in his trade. The adrenalin pushes him and his colleagues — including Alice (Lauren Cohan), whose curse-fuelled texts to her ex-husband are scrubbed clean by a family-reconciliation app — focused on the impossible missions at hand.
The opening scene establishes the meticulous specificity of their operations and their door-die nano-second decisionmaking pace. Wahlberg and company descend upon a team of Russian spies who have been covertly operating in a suburban U.S. home. They’re then assigned a much-trickier mission, to save a U.S. embassy tagged with a ticking bomb that could cause more damage to the surrounding region than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. The bomb is also tied to a messy binary riddle that U.S. coders try to crack while Wahlberg delivers Li Noor (Iko Uwais, of The Raid fame), a refugee-seeker, to a plane that will get him away from his politi- cal enemies. Speaking of which, Mile 22 seems to suggest that the United States is facing many such foes, and no one but the military is capable of understanding how viciously sociopathic these adversaries are. Hence it must get violently sociopathic to combat such threats — which is why extremely brutal death sequences are par for the course here, just another form of punctuation in the grammar of Berg ’s ultraviolent, military-obsessed cinema.
Despite the overtly aggressive message of the movie, Wahlberg and Uwais are in fine form. Uwais takes full advantage of action sequences as a showcase for his martial-arts prowess. Sadly, his talents are a bit wasted, as most of the direction in Mile
22 is scattered, flickering by at such a sped-up rhythm that the constant barrage of close-ups, surveillance footage, computer maps and establishing shots becomes a dizzying and meaningless mess — which is not a bad description for Mile 22.
Though with due time, it will perhaps garner some significance as a political-cultural temperature reading of U.S. anxiety in 2018.