‘Mile 22’ is a violent trip to nowhere
Mile 22 Rated: R for strong violence and language throughout. Running time: 90 minutes. 6 out of 4
The movies have been heading toward this for a while, and now with “Mile 22” we get a film that is almost wall-to-wall violence. There is very little talk, and what little talk there is is entirely confrontational. People are either cursing at each other, threatening each other or killing each other. Or they’re looking at a screen and telling somebody else to kill somebody.
So if you see this movie, don’t go in expecting something normal. (Don’t go in expecting something good, either, but definitely don’t expect normal.) It’s as if “Mile 22” were a movie with a layer over it. Watching it is like seeing it through glass. The elite team members on screen bark at each other about their latest covert operation, and nobody knows what they’re talking about — definitely no one in the audience, and maybe not the actors themselves. And then, boom, we’re in the middle of another bloodbath, and we’re not quite sure why, except we know that Mark Wahlberg is on the side we’re supposed to be rooting for.
Peter Berg directed, and he is a believer in a kind of camera technique that became ubiquitous about a dozen years ago and has just begun to recede from action movies. In “Mile 22,” the camera is in constant motion, and the cuts come quickly. Much of the action is filmed in close-up, a leg here, a fist there, blurry images with the camera too close, so that all you know is that two people are fighting and they probably don’t like each other. And the soundtrack never stops.
All this — the constant fighting, the relentless soundtrack, the obscured dialogue and confused story details — contributes to a feeling of distance and unreality. If it were more effective and less weird, it would just be a bad movie. Instead “Mile 22” is like a bad dream about a bad movie.
Like many new movies, it begins with a slaughter. The audience isn’t told why people are killing each other, the assumption being that audiences don’t care anyway, so long as the movie starts right away on that body count. From there, we establish that Wahlberg is James, part of a small band of covert operatives who do counter-terrorism and counter-espionage, but not subtle varieties of those disciplines. Basically, he doesn’t do any job that doesn’t begin with knocking down a door.
James is a mile-a-minute talker with some kind of screw loose, and in between running around city streets with a machine gun, he is always starting arguments. Think of it as practically a character role. His partner is Alice (Lauren Cohan), who is going through a divorce and feels bad that she’s too busy shooting people in the head (literally) to see her little daughter more often. Something in that captures the twisted subjectivity of this kind of movie. We’re supposed to feel for her and forget the fact that the people she’s killing (lots of them, daily) probably have kids, too.
About a half hour into “Mile 22,” we catch on as to why the plot details were delivered in such an opaque way: They don’t matter. All you need to know is that the movie is about a 22-mile journey from a city center to an airstrip. James, Alice and their associates are trying to smuggle a double agent (Iko Uwais) out of town, and entire armies are trying to stop them.
John Malkovich plays their boss, and just about his entire role involves looking at a screen and giving them instructions. Here and there, he seems to try to have fun by seeing how slowly he can talk without making the audience think that he’s had a cerebrovascular event. He takes it far. Speaking of getting hit in the head, former MMA champ Ronda Rousey plays one of James’ associates. Who knows if Rousey can act? She has very little to say. But at least she has attitude.