SHORT TAKE
MILE 22
From the director who brought us those US military recruitment ads Battleship and Lone Survivor comes Mile 22, a nasty and merciless action thriller.
Director Peter Berg re-teams with
Mark Wahlberg for a fourth time to stage one long and frantic chase through an anonymous Asian city, attempting to smuggle a defector (Indonesian martial artist Iko Uwais) with valuable information to an airfield while wicked Russians hover in the background.
Carnage follows. The action is the clear and finely choreographed kind that made the director and actor’s earlier collaborations Deepwater Horizon and Patriots’ Day surprisingly thrilling; it is also brutal, messy and sadistic. Wahlberg’s potty-mouthed CIA operative spends his time shooting up apartment buildings and ordering drone strikes on deputy foreign ministers. This, we’re told, is a “higher form of patriotism”.
What ought to be a redeeming feature is entirely wasted. Uwais established himself as a modern Bruce Lee in the Indonesian martial arts film The Raid, yet here his skills are scrambled in the editing until all we’re left with is the sound of grunts and skulls shattering.
What’s on display here is nothing but blood-splattered unpleasantness and to point out any resemblance to present geopolitical tensions would be silly.
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