Rent Mile 22 (2018)

Not a great film. - Mile 22 review by Schrödinger's Cake

I’m not averse to abandoning a film midway through when it starts to get ridiculous, and sadly this one fell into the bail-out bucket at around 30min or so.

Mark Wahlberg has been enjoyable to watch in a bunch of films, but this time around it’s as if someone said to him, “Have you seen Lethal Weapon? Yeah? Do that shout- a-lot-crazy-shit thing.” Which works for a couple of scenes, and then just gets dull. To the point where it felt like a parody.

Not only that, the super-elite tactical team ditch all their SOPs and make loads of ridiculous errors of judgement etc which just left me feeling it was pretty unbelievable, frustrated and disengaged.

Not a great film.

What a mess - Mile 22 review by Alphaville

Another in-yer-face actioner from director Peter Berg and this one’s a complete mess. In SE Asia a team of US special forces has to move a defector 22 miles from a city centre to a plane. Characters shout and swear at each other incessantly. The camera shoots them too close-up, often focussing on irrelevant detail. The action is shot with a handheld camera and chopped up by over-editing into a complete mish-mash. It’s difficult to get a handle on anything that’s happening, especially as the plot doesn’t set in until half-way through the movie. To confuse matters further, there are even unnecessary time jumps to a future debriefing of the operation.

As if this wasn’t all gung-ho enough, usual Berg lead Mark Wahlberg this time plays a character with a hyperactive disorder. His macho monologues are painful. Indonesian star Iko Uwais plays the defector, but he’s basically shoehorned into the film for a couple of martial arts fights that are shaky-cammed and edited to oblivion.

Any good points? It’s so ridiculously bad that it’s a primer on how not to shoot action and the DVD contains a raft of extras on filming for the first time in Bogota, Columbia.