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”.