Mile 22: Breaks down

Mile 22 (2018) • View trailer 
Two stars. Rated R, for strong violence and relentless profanity
By Derrick Bang

This flick certainly doesn’t lack ambition.

That’s no compliment. Director Peter Berg’s newest collaboration with star Mark Wahlberg isn’t anywhere near as successful as their other efforts — Patriots Day, Deepwater Horizon and Lone Survivor — because they’re stuck with a script that is both overwrought and ludicrously over-plotted. Writers Lea Carpenter and Graham Roland obviously wanted to concoct a devious, twist-laden, politically hued action thriller, but they tried much, much too hard.

Having arranged to drive Noor (Iko Uwais, right) to a transport plane that'll fly him to the
safety of the United States, Silva (Mark Wahlberg) has no idea how dangerous the
22-mile trip is about to become.

The result is a mess, in terms of both narrative structure and execution. 

I’ve learned, over time, to be wary of films that begin in one of two ways: during a patient conference in a psychiatrist’s office; or during any sort of after-the-fact de-briefing. It’s a clumsy plot device that ruins suspense, often deceives viewers, and becomes increasingly frustrating — as in this case — when the director keeps interrupting the as-it’s-happening action, to cut back to the post-mortem.

No doubt Carpenter and Roland expected this gimmick to pique our curiosity: What is Wahlberg’s James Silva going on about? Doesn’t work that way. It’s just annoying.

Actually, Silva himself is annoying. Very annoying. Wahlberg apparently wanted a role with more than the stable, true-blue, baseball-and-apple-pie, real-life heroes he tackled in his earlier projects with Berg; James Silva is the result. He’s a capable assassin and senior field officer assigned to a CIA tactical command group known as Overwatch: the guy you definitely want handling a sensitive and/or dangerous operation.

He’s also an insufferable pain in the ass: a hyper-focused “spectrum baby” just this side of being bi-polar. He’s impatient, imperious, insubordinate, oblivious to social cues, and unwilling to suffer anybody gladly, whether fools or long-time colleagues. Wahlberg throws far too much twitch into the performance; five minutes into the film, it’s impossible to believe that Silva wouldn’t have been dismissed, decommissioned (with prejudice), jailed or flat-out terminated years ago.

But no: We’re expected to believe that Silva’s team — and his superiors — tolerate the rudeness, gruffness, nasty sarcasm and unpredictability because, y’know, he always gets results. Uh-huh.

We see an early example of this during a tense prologue, as Silva and his comrades infiltrate an American-based Russian safe house. The off-the-books goals: break up the operation, capture and identify the participants, and seize the intel. Things go violently awry, and Overwatch head Bishop (John Malkovich) — monitoring the operation via computer surveillance, from a distant command center — orders all the Russians killed.

“You’re making a mistake,” warns the final victim, as Silva coldly executes him.

Flash-forward two years. Silva and his most trusted colleagues — Alice Kerr (Lauren Cohan), William “Dougie” Douglas III (Carlo Albán) and Sam Snow (Ronda Rousey) — now are stationed at the U.S. Embassy in the politically unstable (and fictitious) Southeast Asian country of Indocarr. A mission to retrieve a cache of radioactive cesium has gone awry, leaving unknown terrorists with the ability to make and detonate extremely dirty bombs.

Then, an unexpected gift: Li Noor (Iko Uwais), an Indocarr special forces officer, turns himself into the American Embassy, requesting safety and political asylum. He carries an encrypted hard drive that contains the locations of the stolen radioactive cesium; he’ll supply the necessary passkey once he’s safely on a plane bound for the United States.

Thousands of miles away, Bishop activates another Overwatch command center; he arranges for a transport plane to land just long enough to get Noor on board. Silva assembles teams in two vehicles, which need to travel only 22 miles to this extraction point; they’ll be guided at all times by Overwatch surveillance personnel, who use drones, hacked Indocarr security cameras and other methods, in order to guide the teams through the city streets.

(In a droll but pointless nod to chess, Bishop’s team members go by the code names King, Queen, Knight, Rook and Pawn. If I were the latter, I’d demand an upgrade.)

Unfortunately, Noor’s act has drawn the attention of Indocarr security chief Axel (Sam Medina), who vows to stop this mission by any means necessary. Translation: scores of black-helmeted, gun-toting thugs on motorcycles and in urban assault vehicles.

Meanwhile — cue a melodramatic bleat from Jeff Russo’s bombastic, soul-deadening score — a mysterious, high-tech Russian spy plane in unknown air space, laden with code breakers and a tight-lipped, high-ranking Russian official (Natasha Goubskaya), infiltrates Overwatch in order to closely monitor every aspect of the American operation.

What are they up to?

So yes: Bad enough that Berg frequently interrupts street-level action with Silva’s aforementioned de-briefing interludes; we also get distracted by repeated cuts to the airborne Russians.

This is nothing more than vamping for time, as a contrived means of — in theory — enhancing suspense. In reality, it’s exasperating.

Aside from Silva, Alice and Noor, Carpenter and Roland don’t even try to give the other key characters distinct personalities or back-stories. They’re all various shades of one-dimensional stick figures, making it easy — based on how much screen time each one receives — to not only predict which of Silva’s team members are doomed, but the precise order in which they’ll perish. That’s impressively slothful screenwriting.

Cohan, at least, is given some depth … although it’s hilariously overwrought and unbelievable. Alice is a divorced mother attempting to co-parent — from Southeast Asia! — while dealing with a jerk ex-husband (Berg, in a brief cameo) and a court-ordered “software nanny” that monitors profanity during phone calls and text messages. Evidence to the blatant contrary, Silva accepts Alice’s word that none of this is “distracting.” (Yeah, right.)

The enigmatic Noor, on the other hand, is fascinating. Brief clips of his behavior, prior to surrendering at the U.S. Embassy, raise tantalizing questions: What’s his actual game? Uwais keeps us guessing, and he does so credibly: as opposed to the over-the-top histrionics so many of this film’s other co-stars confuse with actual acting.

Fans who recognize the Jakarta-born Uwais, from 2011’s amazing The Raid and its 2014 sequel, won’t be surprised when Noor erupts into martial arts fury; he has moves (the traditional Indonesian martial arts form known as silat, to be precise). With such an athletic force of nature at his beck and call, it’s a shame Berg doesn’t give Uwais more room to stretch, instead of — as is typical, with such films — spending somuch time with gunfire, gunfire and gunfire.

The relentless F-bombs are equally tiresome. Somebody needs to remind today’s lazier screenwriters that these aren’t go-to adjectives and adverbs.

Everything builds to an eyebrow-lifting finale that is guaranteed to annoy viewers, and feels like a clumsily contrived ploy for a sequel. Which is to say, the film doesn’t conclude; it merely stops. Highly unsatisfying.

Berg is capable of solid action thrillers, as his previous efforts with Wahlberg attest. But he’s also been responsible for high-profile garbage, such as 2012’s Battleship and 2008’s Hancock. Mile 22, alas, veers more toward the latter.