As we have consistently seen in the chain of recent directorial efforts of Peter Berg, he does like action and explosions. Be it “Battleship”, “Lone Survivor”, “Deepwater Horizon”, and most recently, “Patriots Day”, with each experience, visuals give the appearance as if he’s trying to outdo himself on the size and number of the big booms, firefights, and shootouts. Now with MILE 22, it looks as though he has achieved what could be perceived as the ultimate editing reel of explosions and firefights with some spectacular martial arts scenes interspersed thanks to two mind-boggling sequences. And I refer to this film as an editing reel because the majority of the film is cut cut cut cut cut cut cut between firefights, street shootouts, apartment building cat and mouse hunts, with the cuts all rapid-fire coming at you with the speed and timing of a Gatling gun. At the top of the directorial ladder with his patented “combat cinema” stylization, with MILE 22 Berg delivers a film that is enjoyable almost to a fault when it comes to action, but unfortunately, despite Mark Wahlberg’s mantra of “character, character, character” with collaborator Peter Berg, falls short with character development and substantive story.
Written by Lea Carpenter from a story by Carpenter and Graham Roland, there is never a doubt that this is Carpenter’s first screenplay. Using a simple structuring with characters moving from point A to point B to point C with obstacles thrown in-between, Carpenter is adept at moving the pieces of the puzzle, but fails when it comes to the how and why and why should the audience even care. The film is lacking in connective story tissue and anything that would allow the audience to connect and invest in any of the characters, save for the film’s antagonist. That’s right. The antagonist, played by martial arts phenom Iko Uwais.
Led by CIA operative James Silva (possibly the most pissed off, angry individual on the planet with a permanent hard-on for life), we first meet a small, but lethal, paramilitary team as they invade a safe house housing Russian spies somewhere in Anytown, U.S.A. The operation does not go without casualties for Silva’s team, and while the Russians are obliterated, there is something unsettling about a kill by Silva; a young boy who lay dying saying he’s not the one Silva wants. Falling on deaf ears, Silva puts the boy out of his misery like a lame horse. Cold, heartless, unflinching.
Fast forward sixteen months to the Southeast Asian country of Indocarr where we again meet up with Silva and his team. Russians are still spying, but there are some new players in town. Alleged intelligence source Li Noor appears on the doorstep of the Embassy claiming to have an encrypted hard drive which contains the location of cesium powerful enough to destroy entire nations, not to mention containing the names of those individuals behind the soon to be executed nuclear holocaust. Although one of Silva’s team, Alice Kerr, trusts Noor, Silva does not, so when Il Noor insists on asylum in the United States, things start to get a bit dicey; especially when an Asian counterpart of Silva’s gets involved with the country’s Prime Minister asking for return of their low-level “nobody”.
When an attempt is made on Il Noor’s life (leading to the one of the greatest martial arts battles to ever unfold on screen), Silva realizes maybe the guy is on the level and the operation kicks into high gear, getting elevated to the super secret classification under “Overwatch.” Helmed by a man named Bishop, Overwatch is the last line of defense in the espionage world. Using drones to oversee the ground ops, players are remotely moved by Bishop as if in a chess game. Most interesting is that for a group of individuals who cannot let emotion rule them in any fashion, during the operation Bishop is referred to as “Mother” and each of the ground team are numbered children aka Child One, Child Two, etc.
Determined to get Il Noor out of the country and back to U.S. soil, with the clock ticking before the encrypted disk “disintegrates”, the team must transport him from the American embassy to the extraction location 22 miles away. And as we see, this is anything but an easy ride down Main Street.
The opening pre-titles sequence of MILE 22 with the team invading the safe house is riveting, not to mention capped off with a few comedic notes. There’s some funny banter playing on the age-old anecdotes of men never asking for directions, and then it explodes into a black ops operation. Very effective is “Mother” aka Bishop and his team at another location giving us a minute by minute countdown, and cutting to the various “children” carrying out the ops within the house. Mother’s in-house team are all identified as chess pieces – Rook, Knight, Pawn, King, and the odd woman out, M.I.T. The glimpse into high tech biometric monitoring of each “child” is interesting, and proves to be a cold but effective way of telling everyone a child is in trouble or dead. With that opening, as “Mother”, John Malkovich captures our interest and while heading this ice-veined operation, shows emotion and caring for the “children” through facial expression, not to mention his nervous pacing throughout the room. You are begging to know more about this man and we’re only 7 minutes into the film.
But then we jump ahead 16 months into the land of character unlikeability and “who cares what happens to them”. Mark Wahlberg’s Silva is a psycho. A robot would have more appeal than him. He is unlikeable, acerbic, assholic, (although extremely good at black ops), and but for one or two moments (notably in act three when Alice Kerr is missing and Silva and Li Noor go to find her) is one-note crazy the entire film. Even during his chaptered “interrogation” inserts, he is unlikeable and unrelatable. Unfortunately, those interrogation insets do little if nothing to give the audience any backstory or reason or understanding of what happened, and appear to serve merely as tools to give Wahlberg alone time on screen.
As the film progresses, we are given convoluted tidbits about what’s happening with Silva and his team – Alice Kerr, Sam Snow, William Douglas – and this op gone bad with the missing cesium. Alice’s alleged low level law enforcement informant, Il Noor, has allegedly given bad intel. He then shows up at US Embassy and wants asylum. He delivers a computer drive with the codes to find missing cesium but it’s a self-destruct drive on a timer. He won’t give the code unless he gets safe passage to the US. After Silva delivers a killer speech that he delivers to the “not Harvard/MIT” tech in Bishop’s cadre of talent (which Wahlberg nails through the roof), the action kicks in for the rest of the film as the foreign minister and his aide Axel (subtlety played by Sam Medina) argue they want Il Noor back and insist that he is a “nobody”.
Thanks to some of the finest editing on screen at the moment courtesy of Melissa Lawson Cheung and Colby Parker, Jr., the audience concurrently witnesses the assassination attempt on Il Noor and his less-than-low-level response. But this raises nagging questions within character and story that are never answered, one being what is the relationship between Silva and Axel. There is a backstory there that we never get and will never know. Thanks to Wahlberg and Medina, you feel an intense personal animosity yet mutual respect between the two men but the audience isn’t given anything to hold on to or build on as to why aren’t they just shooting each other in the face.
But then the film becomes chase, escape, and explode for 22 miles. We see people die and get blown to bits, but sadly, any death is unaffecting because nothing has been provided to connect the audience to any character, but for the antagonist, Il Noor. Granted, these blacker than black ops folks are nothing but “ghosts”, but as we see with a small slice into the life of Alice Kerr, they do have families. But Berg and Carpenter don’t give us anything to make us care about life or death. The script is even lacking any information to support Il Noor’s claims that the information on the disk can bring down the entire government “of the country you are now in”. This one bit of dialogue then begs the question of whether the country being referred to is Indocarr or is it the US given that when in the Embassy or in Embassy vehicles you are deemed to be ‘in the US’ from a political standpoint. So, will the disk destroy the US? Adding more confusion is that Berg has already set the volatility stage with a real-life news montage at the film’s opening which is so current it even includes a shot of Trump and Kim Jong-Un.
As Alice Kerr, Lauren Cohan has her operating on pure internal anger and guilt, but it’s perhaps too little too late to see a softer more likeable side of her during the second most high octane battle in the film where Alice is confronted by a little Asian girl caught in the crossfire. Established early on is that Alice is a rather bad mother. Consumed by guilt at losing custody of her daughter, it feels as if she’s on a suicide mission at all times and yet, when she deliberately violates custody terms and swears and antagonizes her ex with texts and phone calls, that doesn’t demonstrate that this woman really cares about her daughter. The only likeable moment with Alice is when she protects the little Asian girl during the firefight, but as stated, too little too late to feel for the character.
But then we have Ronda Rousey. As Sam Snow, she is the truest and most likeable in the bunch. Rousey is a natural with heavy armament (as we saw for the first time in “Expendables 3”) and her physical agility makes her the most believable and resonant of Mother’s “children”. Plus, she has a game face that we’ve seen so many times before when she’s being Ronda Rousey in the cage, that this role is a natural fit for her. But where Rousey excels is in giving Sam some personality, some caring, likeability. You connect with her. You want to know more about Sam. And in the first scene set in Indocarr in a “coffee shop” with a little boy giving her a slice of birthday cake – there is a sentimentality and sweetness as her face lights up at the kindness. . . only to have Silva throw the plate to the floor, metaphorically and presciently smashing it.
Iko Uwais is who makes MILE 22 and gives it not only action chops with his martial arts skills, but from an emotional performance standpoint. Long a fan of his action work thanks to “The Raid” franchise but here, Uwais really gets into character development and growth as an actor. Il Noor is the fascinating character. Il Noor is the one character you really do care about, especially as you see him shift and care about saving Alice and team up with Silva. Uwais is fascinating to watch – and that’s just in scenes within the Embassy or the car. His performance is standout as he creates a manipulative ambiguity that intrigues and resonates. And then you toss in the action and he just explodes. And yes, the lensing of his martial arts fight scenes, although in the more claustrophobic room in the Embassy (before he breaks through the glass window) or the apartment building hallway, are on the whole superb, but some of the camera moves/editing are not smooth. As effective as the kinetic nature of Berg’s “combat cinema” is, trying to capture the speed and flow of the martial art movements leaves some moments that become too jerky with the rapidity of movement and camera cuts.
The overall cinematographic look and visual tonal bandwidth created by Jaques Jouffret, particularly with his use of ECU’s and dutching, is superbly done. You feel the intensity and the unfolding chaos thanks to the visual design. Sound design is also well above average for an action film like MILE 22. Even with all the gunfire and explosions, the few bits of dialogue are NOT sacrificed and we actually get to hear the radio calls, the dialogue, etc. So appreciative of the sound design and editing of Dror Mohar and his team.
There are third act reveals, one of which is pretty slick, but most which fall flat if one has paid attention to the film’s opening. And many questions are raised but answers are never provided. The one thing that does appear apparent is that everyone’s spies are smarter than those of the U.S.
MILE 22 is well worth seeing for the work of Malkovich, Rousey and Uwais. And it’s more than entertaining for the action fan. But if you’re looking for more meat and potatoes with story and the true intrigue of espionage, go read a Tom Clancy novel.
Directed by Peter Berg
Written by Lea Carpenter from story by Carpenter and Graham Roland
Cast: Mark Wahlberg, John Malkovich, Ronda Rousey, Iko Uwais, Carlo Alban, Lauren Cohan, Sam Medina
by debbie elias, 07/28/2018
