Mile 22 (2018)

Usually, I relegate movies that piss me off quite as much as this thing to my Saturday “Three Films Make A Post” segment but sometimes a boy does have to express his anger and pain in more than a hundred words. Really, calling this a movie goes a bit far, and is a bit of an insult to those people making movies in their grandma’s backyards and could probably use the 35 to 60 Million US Dollars this was apparently budgeted at to make a thousand films that at least show some enthusiasm for the art of filmmaking; and who certainly have more talent than the crew of highly paid professionals under “director” (I use this term loosely) Peter Berg demonstrate here.

Now, if you’ve seen any of the other films Berg made with Marky Mark in the lead, you’ll probably expect the reactionary spirit far beyond the average of the not exactly progressive action movie genre (and as you know, I love me some action movies even if they have their heart on the wrong side), as well as the inability of Wahlberg to act his way out of a wet paper back, his macho alpha male posturing mostly emphasising how ridiculous the guy is in these roles; the casual racism is going to be a given too, I suppose.

But Berg (and whoever else is responsible for the decisions made during and after production) doesn’t stop there this time around. The dialogue (“script” – and I use the term even more loosely then “director” - by Lea Carpenter) is a painful mess that’s made slightly more bearable by a sound mix that seems as embarrassed by this shit as everyone else involved also should have been and buries about half of the dialogue under noise and crappy music. The action direction lets the Michael Bays and Tony Scotts of this world look like beacons of clarity, Berg apparently going out of his way to shoot the action sequences by pointing away from the action as often as possible. This becomes particularly egregious during the martial arts fights of poor, misused Iko Uwais (who also happens to be the only one in the movie bothering with some acting; Marky Mark can’t, John Malkovich won’t), scenes that suggest to me that Berg would really hate for the audience to see or actually enjoy any of this crap. For reasons only known to the filmmakers, our “hero” spends much of his time insulting everyone he meets, be it co-workers, strangers or random passersby, making the guy unsympathetic even in a genre whose heroes are borderline psychopaths anyway. The film’s also suffering from the delusion that gritty (you can bet everybody involved just loves that descriptor, plus the good old “edgy”) dialogue means having Marky Mark use the word fuck at least ten times in every scene. In reality, this just makes the character we spend most of the film with even more of an asshole, and a childish one to boot.

Tonally, this pretends not to be a proper action movie at all, but more the kind of think-peace-style semi-political semi-action thing like Sicario or Zero Dark Thirty (both films I have problems with, too, but rather more upmarket ones having to do with their meaning and storytelling and not a lack of even the most basic filmmaking skills). That nobody involved has the brains or the talent to actually make that sort of film nearly goes without saying; turns out there’s more to this filmmaking stuff than pointing a camera away from the action. Though that bit, Berg has down pat.


I could go on berating Mile 22 for another six-hundred words or so, but by now, my imaginary readers will have gotten the gist and can supply their own insults towards its “storytelling” and “plotting”.

Three Films Make A Post: Every THING needs to eat.

Seven Keys to Baldpate (1947): Lew Landers’s version of the Earl Derr Biggers (of Charlie Chan fame) novel is a pleasant little Old Dark House movie, zipping merrily along through its semi-comedic tale of a writer coming to a very special writing retreat for a bet and encountering all sorts of Old Dark House nonsense (though no gorilla, I sadly have to report). I’m pretty sure this one was already pretty lightweight 70 years ago, and if you expect hidden depths to the film you’ll probably be sorely disappointed. However, old pro Landers certainly knew how to pace a film, and even how to involve comic relief characters without it becoming annoying. He also bothered to put in enough atmospheric shots and suspenseful – if old-fashioned – little moments to make this a pleasant and fun experience to watch, even today.

2 Guns (2013): If you’d tell me there are two directors named Baltasar Kormákur working right now, the good one and the one making boring action comedies with Mark Wahlberg, I’d probably believe you. This one pairs Marky Mark with poor old Denzel Washington to go through the old buddy cop/whatever routine. The result isn’t pretty, with the leading couple lacking in chemistry, a script that seemingly tries to be the first comedy without any jokes, action scenes that are competently shot yet totally uninvolving, and a cast that seems about as invested in their characters as I found myself to be – not at all. Only Bill Paxton as evil CIA man and Edward James Olmos as Mexican Cartel boss put any kind of effort and charm in but our supposed leading men work far below their capabilities. It’s hard to blame them, for the whole affair feels less like a film anyone involved actually wanted to make than a low effort pay check for anyone involved.


The Debutantes (2017): This Filipino horror movie by Prime Cruz about a teenage outsider (Sue Ramirez) with strange powers finding herself first pulled into, than degraded by her school’s queen bees and the ensuing deadly consequences isn’t any more original than 2 Guns but it sure as hell is more involving. That’s thanks to some more than decent acting by the whole of the young cast, spirited direction and a script that actually has a point and knows how to get there. Following my usual love for the local in horror cinema, I am also rather happy to report that the supernatural explanation for the minor mayhem that ensues is not quite as close to the Carrie model as I had at first expected but uses a creature of Filipino myth and legend to express thematic concerns about loneliness and alienation. All of which isn’t bad at all for a teen horror film.

In short: Contraband (2012)

Once, Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg), was the best smuggler there was. By now, he has retired to the more bourgeois wife (Kate Beckinsale) and kids stuff, working as the owner of a security tech firm. Unfortunately, his wife’s little brother Andy (Caleb Landry Jones) is attempting to step into his old comfy smuggling shoes, which works well enough until he has to drop a load of drugs into the sea to avoid it and him falling into the hands of the coast guard. Not surprisingly, Tim Briggs (Giovanni Ribisi), the guy whose drugs these were, isn’t at all happy. Why, he’s giving Andy only a couple of days to come up with quite a bit of money. Otherwise, Andy’s dead, and going by Briggs’s logic, his debts will fall on his wife and her family.

Because he can’t find any other way to come up with the money, and because he’s certainly not going to let his brother in law get killed by a raving lunatic, Chris decides to make one last big smuggling run. It’s the sort of smuggling run where whatever could go wrong does indeed go wrong, so he has to fight the vagaries of a really rude ship’s captain (J.K. Simmons doing his thing), work with unreliable contacts, take part in an impromptu armoured car assault, and so on and so forth. That’s all before we come to various betrayals on the home front, mind you.

Baltasar Kormákur’s Contraband is the sort of everything and the kitchen sink thriller that you’ll either loathe with a passion for its various crimes against plausibility and coherent writing or sort of enjoy because it is decently entertaining for what it is. It is certainly a film absolutely disinterested in emphasizing the more interesting parts of its narrative - which could turn this into a gut-wrenching film about betrayals, people falling back to their worst selves in case of danger, and the inability to ever escape the past – in favour of spending most of its time adding one bizarre complication after the other, with a side-line in a particularly yawn-inducing version of ye olde family under threat subplot.

As a member of the order of forgettable popcorn cinema, thriller division, the film isn’t without merit, though, for while only very few of the complications in the path of Marky Mark (who makes all the facial expressions a serious actors makes when tasked with a silly thriller, don’t you worry, and only half phones his performance in) make much sense, there’s something to be said to the film’s repeated shrugging of its shoulders, mumbling “whatever”, and throwing a quick security van heist or whatever other nonsense just came to mind in. It is certainly never boring, though not quite coherent enough in tone, style and pacing to be as fun as it could be. The regular popping in with the indignities Beckinsale’s character has to go through doesn’t help with the latter much, particularly since the film never gives her anything more to actually do than be the helpless wife. And I’ve seen more interesting examples of those too.


Ribisi and Ben Foster as Wahlberg’s traitorous best friend put some enthusiastic efforts in, at least, and the action is competent and fun enough to watch. Just don’t expect to remember anything about Contraband a couple of weeks after you have seen it.