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Over the last five years, Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg have created their own kind of action movie shorthand, working together on four tense and explosive real-life thrillers. In their latest, Mile 22, they step away from true stories for a race through the streets of a fictional nation on a mission that could save millions of people.
Mile 22 stars Wahlberg as Jimmy Silva, a member of an elite paramilitary organization known as Overwatch. While on a mission in Southeast Asia, Jimmy and his team find themselves in a race against time when one of their contacts produces a disc containing valuable information—but the only way he’ll give up the access code is if they get him out of the country before it self-destructs. The local government clearly doesn’t want the asset to get away—so the team faces one deadly battle after another as they attempt to get out of the country in time.
This breakneck thriller doesn’t hold much of anything back—and it doesn’t waste any time before diving right in. From the opening scene, it’s tense and explosive and sometimes shockingly violent, with quick cuts and disorienting action sequences. The story is minimal, though the choppy style often makes it hard to understand what’s going on and why—and some parts of the story don’t make much sense at all. But really, the details of movies like this one don’t matter. Once you have the basics—the race to get the asset safely out of the country to secure the valuable information that he controls—you can follow the action.
Meanwhile, Wahlberg helps audiences in the process of settling into the film without too much introduction simply by being himself. Jimmy is the same fast-talking, no-nonsense kind of character that audiences expect from the likeable star. This time, he gets a bit of an unnecessary back story, which plays out in a quick montage about the gifted child with a troubled past. He’s intense and slightly unhinged—a tough guy with anger management issues—but he’s dedicated to his job and his team.
Admittedly, though, there’s nothing here that’s especially memorable. Most of the characters are just anonymous (and expendable) team members, and even the ones who have some kind of story outside the mission are only slightly interesting. And they all tend to get lost in the midst of the fights and chases and explosions.
Of course, if you enjoy movies with lots of action and not a lot of story—and you’re a fan of Mark Wahlberg—you’ll still enjoy this brainless race against time. But while the film is rumored to have been developed as the first installment in a trilogy, audiences probably won’t be clamoring for a sequel.
Listen to the review on Reel Discovery:
