When ego is definitely not your amigo!

THE collaborations between Peter Berg, alpha-male director, and Mark Wahlberg, alpha-male star, have yielded some decent films, such as Lone Survivor (2013) and Deepwater Horizon (2016).

Mile 22, their latest, is not one of them, though it at least has the virtue of lasting only 94 minutes.

It’s a depressingly violent, jingoistic, cliche-ridden action-thriller with some admittedly exhilarating chase and fight sequences but no credible plot connecting them, and no likeable or even faintly sympathetic characters.

Wahlberg plays the deeply tiresome Jimmy Silva, a bi-polar covert operations officer. At one point even his boss ( John Malkovich) snaps at him to ‘stop monologuing’.

And yet the screenwriter, Lea Carpenter, lets him monologue away until an enemy mission to riddle him with bullets begins to seem like a pretty good idea, if only so he won’t repeat the year’s single worst line of movie dialogue: ‘Ego is not your amigo.’ The opening scene sees Silva supervising an attack against a Russian safe house in a leafy U.S. suburb, but soon he is somewhere non-leafy in South-East Asia with a brief to escort a prized double-agent called Li (Indonesian martial arts legend Iko Uwais) the 22 miles from the U.S. embassy to the airport.

You don’t need to know much more, except that some horrific pictures of victims of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs are permitted to serve the narrative, which seems inappropriately glib at best, though I prefer to think of it as downright unconscionable.