**** outta *****

4 outta 5

Mile 22 is a very crude, borderline offensive, needlessly foul mouthed, cheesy, dumb, excessively violent and sometimes unintentionally hilarious. This actually is part of its charm as it is directed with Peter Berg’s visceral eye that puts the audience in the action. It is an incredibly zippy experience and only pauses for cool moments, blood splatter, explosions or star Mark Wahlberg yelling at someone which is actually pretty consistently entertaining.

Overwatch is a super secret U.S.A. spy and assassination team led on the ground by James (Wahlberg) with team members Alice (Lauren Cohan), Sam (Ronda Rousey) and others, all co-ordinated back at the base of operations by Bishop (John Malkovich). An informant, Li (Iko Uwais), has details on the location of a deadly biological agent he will only reveal it if he gets transportation out of his socially collapsing country. Now Overwatch have to get Li to a plane 22 miles away but on their tail is a bunch of corrupt law enforcement officers led by Axel (Sam Medina) that are very much trying to kill them dead.

This is director Peter Berg’s fourth consecutive film with Mark Wahlberg after Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon and Patriot’s Day. Those other three movies were all based on very important real life moments and have a sense of deep, Oscar-bait seriousness to them. But Berg has a long history of action movies and even in the previous three very serious based on a true story films his action tendencies are peeking around the edges. The shameless dumbness in this movie compared to the last ones is pretty refreshing. This is the type of movie where someone is about to be toasted by a drone strike as Wahlberg makes a finger gun “bang” motion only because it looks really cool. That is not something that can be shown in harrowing tales of real life survival and trauma.

The ending of the film is tricky, straddling a line between an unexpected swerve and blatant sequel bait franchise teasing. Even though apparently there is already a writer working on a sequel and the production company has stated they want to build out a Mile 22 multi-media cinematic universe (which is all the rage these days) it’s entirely possible no more instalments or narrative closure will be forthcoming. Looking at Mile 22 as one film with a singular ending is sort of a dark and ambiguous surprise which is not entirely unearned. However, on the flipside, it seems like the movie is just cut off 20 minutes from the finale.

Sometimes Mark Wahlberg plays normal guy in extraordinary situations. And sometimes Mark Wahlberg just plays a giant jerk who hollers a lot. This is the latter one and it is hilariously mean. At one point, a tech is trying to decrypt a data package and he tears a strip off of her for no discernible reason. Heck, at one point he even throws Sam’s birthday cake on the floor! He is a total motor-mouth, constantly spewing profanity, ranting and flicking at a rubber band around his wrist. This is not a subtle performance but this is not a subtle movie.

Rousey is basically there to be one of the random people in the crew but she gets in a few choice one-liners and has a good exit. Cohan’s Alice gets a pretty unnecessary subplot about being a divorced mom who wants to see her daughter but it does allow her to unleash a remarkably fast and deep string of swear words. Malkovich is stuck behind computer monitors basically saying exposition about how close the bad guys are but at one point he starts waxing philosophical about the nature of evil in man. As the relentless bad guy chasing them, Medina growls a lot as Axel is simply mildly irritated about the violence he is unleashing.

Iko Uwais is fantastic as his seemingly peaceful informant is constantly doing meditation tricks to keep his clam centre yet he has to consistently engage in violence.  There’s a great action scene of him handcuffed to a gurney and he has to fend off two attackers at once, breaking off chunks of the scenery and wailing them over the head. Whenever Uwais delivers some ass kicking it’s consistently great. There should have been a lot more of it, frankly. His nicely off kilter strangeness is a big reason why that wonky ending actually sort of works dramatically. Sometimes the action gets lost in the shaky-cam but most of the time it feels really immediate. The shootouts have a lot of blood splatter and there are some viciously stone cold moments, like when Overwatch agents ask for permission to whack some terrorists. The film plays its action very straight but since it’s so over the top messy that it is sort of funny. Although by the end the conceit of one movie long action scene starts to wear a bit thin.

Mile 22 is an action movie that certainly delivers. The script dialogue is a bit dumb and way too in love with f-bombs but it’s sold with conviction. Action movies used to be big, gory and profanity laden which was lost along the way. Probably for the best, really, but it is good to see a shameless throwback.