Review: Mile 22

Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg reunite in Mile 22, their fourth collaboration within the last five years and undoubtedly the weakest of all their pairings. Concerned with Wahlberg's James Silva and his elite black-ops squad, the film at least boasts the charismatic presence of Iko Uwais, who battled all comers in The Raid films, as well as Berg's characteristically brawny direction.

Berg has always displayed a panache for exigent filmmaking so that even nothing scenes, which comprise a chunk of Mile 22, are executed in such a way that the busyness itself becomes a type of propulsion and narrative. The opening sequence in which Silva and team infiltrate a Russian safe house disguised as a suburban home, for example, is an essentially pedestrian one, made hyper-energised by Berg's impressionistic staging and Colby Parker Jr. and Melissa Lawson Cheung's whiplash editing. Yet even with their efforts, there's already something about Mile 22 that feels disposable from its first frame.

The meat of Lea Carpenter's screenplay involves the efforts of Silva and his crew, which includes John Malkovich as team overseer Bishop and Lauren Cohan as the calm but steely Alice, who is currently undergoing an acrimonious divorce, to track down and destroy all shipments of a toxic substance named cesium before it can be weaponised by the wrong hands. The only person who has the information to the cesium's location is Li Noor (Uwais), who requests asylum and safe passage out of the unnamed Southeast Asian country in which he resides in exchange for handing over an encrypted hard drive that has all the information they need. As added incentive, Noor has set the drive to self-destruct in eight hours. If they want to decrypt the drive, then they need him for the code and the only way he'll hand over the code is if they meet his wishes.

Don't worry if you haven't been paying attention for the film is more than happy to stop proceedings halfway through the film so that Bishop can catch you up. As entertaining as it is to watch Malkovich put in minimal effort in a just-for-the-paycheck role, it's these down moments that drag down Mile 22. Even more problematic is the character of Silva, whose deeply unpleasant and relentlessly grating behaviour is nearly unwatchable. It's almost worth tolerating Silva just to hear Bishop say, "Stop monologuing, you bipolar f**k!" Berg and Carpenter would have done better to make Silva a man of as few words as possible and to focus more time on Uwais, who once again displays his tremendously impressive fighting skills. It's been reported that Wahlberg and Berg plan to expand Mile 22 into a trilogy of films. If that's the case, then less chatter and more action please. Or, more precisely, less Wahlberg and more Uwais.

Mile 22

Directed by: Peter Berg

Written by: Lea Carpenter

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Lauren Cohan, Iko Uwais, John Malkovich, Ronda Rousey, Nikolai Nikolaeff, Carlo Alban, Terry Kinney