Mark Reviews Movies: MILE 22

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 16, 2018

Aware that there's a lot of exposition and dialogue to get through before getting to the action, director Peter Berg just treats all of those early scenes of minimal character building, plot explanation, and backdrop development as action scenes. The calmest scene of Mile 22 comes right at the beginning, as Berg establishes the layout of a siege on a secret FSB headquarters in some suburban locale. Once the assault begins, the movie rarely lets up to allow us or the characters to catch their breaths. They definitely could use a moment, even when they're simply explaining their backgrounds or the situation at hand. They yell or rush through all of those lines.

We could use one, too. There's not a lot of information to cull from the scenes that establish the eventual plot, but Berg and screenwriter Lea Carpenter certainly lay it on thick. The opening credits give us the back story of James Silva (Mark Wahlberg), the on-site leader of a team of CIA operatives who work for Overwatch, the group that does the dirty work that comes after diplomacy and before full-on war. Yes, the movie can't even pause to give credit to the people who made it, without overloading us with details about a character who can be summed up in a single sentence: Silva is really smart and prone to fits of anger.

After the siege (admittedly a decent action sequence but also one that kind of flies in the face of the movie's assertion that we need to know anything about these characters for the action to work), Silva and his team are on assignment at the U.S. embassy in a city in Southeast Asia. There's a lot of yelling and a plenty of rapid-fire dialogue. The yelling comes from Silva when he's frustrated that people don't understand his thinking (He also has a rubber band around his wrist, which he snaps whenever his mind gets racing).

It also comes from Alice (Lauren Cohan), another agent who's going through a messy divorce. The fast-talking comes from pretty much everyone, as there's a race against the clock to find missing nuclear material that wasn't recovered in a recent operation.

Enter Li Noor (Iko Uwais), a local police officer who has a locked disk that holds the locations of the nuclear caches. He's willing to give up the password if he can obtain asylum in the U.S.

After more yelling and more rapid dialogue and some strange flashes to Silva being debriefed in the future (It basically gives the movie a chance to indulge in some broad and indefinite cynicism about the system, man, using a lot of clichés), the government agrees to Li's terms. Silva and his team, which includes characters played by Ronda Rousey and Carlo Alban (Since neither one is provided with a back story, it's pretty easy to figure out their purpose here), have to take Li from the embassy to the local airport—22 miles, in case one's curious about the origin of the title.

In an undisclosed location, John Malkovich's Bishop leads a team of tech experts to guide Silva's team through the city. Since Berg is apparently aware that he has created some unnecessary confusion with the quick cuts and the insistence that his actors play to the balcony, Bishop also gives a quick summary of everything that has happened until that point (meaning the movie trades in clarity for clumsiness). The rest of the plot is basically a trip through the city, with plenty of stops for fistfights and shootouts in heavily populated locations.

They're competent enough, although they boil down to a bunch of characters we don't care about firing rounds into anonymous goons, before running or driving to a new location, where the process repeats itself. The one inspiration is the casting of Uwais, the Indonesian action star who also choreographs his own fights. Those who know of the actor's unique brand of brutal and bloody choreography will be pleased that he gets a chance to show it off in a Hollywood action movie. His presence, as a mysterious stranger of unclear allegiance, and his fights, which are even bloodier than the movie's multiple firefights, offer the one, definitive highlight of a movie that just goes through the motions.

Those motions lead to a lot of carnage, followed by more bloodshed and explosions. It's repetitive and hollow, building up to a final twist that seems more like setting up a sequel than providing a satisfactory conclusion. The moral of Mile 22 is that modern warfare is a messy, indistinct, and depressing game. So, too, is an action movie such as this one.

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