A BANG, BANG- UP JOB
Sean Penn has plenty of firepower and nice abs in latest action flick
Remember Sean Penn as Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, toting a surfboard and claiming: “Danger is my business?”
Well, he’s up to more of the same all these years later in The Gunman, one of those globe- trotting shoot-’ em- ups that features more arms than a casting call for Shiva.
Granted, he’s only got the board in one otherwise throwaway scene, but it’s clear we’re meant to check out the 54- year- old’s newly sculpted abs in wonder. ( Wonder if he’s angling for more action roles?)
Penn plays Jim Terrier, a former mercenary who shot and killed a government minister in war- ridden Congo back in 2006. We get a brief look at that operation and meet his boss, Felix ( Javier Bardem), and his girlfriend, Annie ( Jasmine Trinca).
Cut to the present day; Jim is now a humanitarian aid worker in the same part of Africa. This is an honourable way to atone for his past misdeeds, although perhaps not the best place to hide from them. One day a group of armed thugs burst in on his waterworks project looking to kill “the white man.”
Jim escapes and decides he’d better find out who’s after him. This leads him first to London and then Barcelona, where Felix is now a legitimate businessman and married to Annie. ( In fairness, Jim did ask him to “look after her” after the assassination.)
The Gunman is based on the 1981 novel The Prone Gunman by Jean- Patrick Manchette, although more importantly it’s directed by Pierre Morel, a graduate of the Luc Besson school of incendiary filmmaking, and the man who gave Liam Neeson his second career as an action hero in 2008’ s Taken.
It’s reasonably quiet in the early going, focusing more on fabulous locations ( including Felix’s Spanish country house) than explosions, though rest assured there are enough of those by the time the story is told. In fact, intriguing settings and violence are nicely mixed in scenes that involve a merry- go- round, the underbelly of an aquarium and a bullfight in which angry animals are released on evil characters in, it must be said, rather contrived ways.
Speaking of plot engineering, Jim also suffers from post- concussion syndrome, which means he has to bolster his fractured memory with a paper diary listing where all the skeletons are buried. He also suffers crippling migraines that attack him just before the bad guys do.
Of course, Jim is a former bad guy himself, which lends an extra layer of moral ambiguity to the action. There is not enough to qualify as profundity, but at least it’s something more to think about than the snazzy sports car he manages to pick up while on the run.
In addition to Bardem, the film features some first- rate actors — Ray Winstone, Mark Rylance, etc. — as confederates from Jim’s past who may or may not be his friends in the present. It’s disappointing not to see more of Idris Elba, however, who gets high billing but appears only 80 minutes into the movie in a brief scene in which he talks in circles. I’m guessing he was a casualty of editing — which, given the level of violence in the film, may have been the best fate he could have hoped for.