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.
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| 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.
