Mile 22 Movie Review

Mile 22 (2018)

Watch the trailer
Written by: Lea Carpenter (screenplay by), Graham Roland and Lea Carpenter (story by)
Directed by: Peter Berg
Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Lauren Cohan, Iko Uwais, John Malkovich, Ronda Rousey
Rated: R

Plot
An elite American intelligence officer, aided by a top-secret tactical command unit, tries to smuggle a mysterious police officer with sensitive information out of the country.

Verdict
This movie is a misfire. While the story isn't great, the editing and directing do grave harm. Wahlberg's character is insufferable whenever he's speaking and the editing is unintelligible. What happened? This isn't Berg's first action movie, but it just isn't good. I can handle a sub-par story, though the character building is atrocious, but the action is not even competent. It really is terrible that Uwais only has one somewhat cool fight scene and the editing does its best to mess it up.
Skip it.

Review
Uwais was in the acclaimed action movies The Raid (read my review) and The Raid 2 (read my review). His abilities are squandered in this movie with choppy editing and a lack of letting Uwais do his thing.

Berg and Wahlberg also did Lone Survivor (read my review) and Deepwater Horizon (read my review). I enjoyed those movies, but Mile 22 really is a failure. While there is a sequel already in the works, I'm willing to bet it doesn't progress much farther than just a concept.

Mark Wahlburg plays Jimmy Silva.

Iko Uwais plays Li Noor.

Uwais's The Raid movies were awesome action. The guy has the moves, but it doesn't translate. Mile 22 isn't awesome. All this movie had to do is figure out who choreographed fight scenes in The Raid and hire them. At one point I thought this movie was going to take inspiration from The Raid when Wahlburg and his team are forced to retreat to an apartment building. That hope was squandered.
Wahlburg's character is insufferable. He's just just mean. He also talks fast because the movie tells us he's so smart, but other than the movie telling us that, there is no indication of it. He doesn't develop a brilliant strategy. He doesn't engineer a weapon that saves them.
Wahlburg can do jerk characters well. In The Departed his character was a jerk, but it was a side character and it could be humorous. It doesn't work as well when I don't like the main character.

 

The worst thing is that the action is un-intelligible. It's really disappointing direction. I haven't seen action this poorly edited since The Expendables 3. In that movie, I wasn't sure who was punching and getting hit. Mile 22 isn't that bad, but it's not much better. The action is cut very quickly. In Uwais's first, and really only decent fight scene, the cutting makes his abilities less impressive. A lot of times action scenes use a lot of cutting because the actor can't perform, but Uwais can, or at least he used to.

Even one of the early scenes that was just a conversation was edited so strange. It had quick cuts to lots of differing angles that were weird making the scene disorienting. It's a lot like how the action is edited, but you shouldn't edit a conversation like that.

Mark Wahlburg and Lauren Cohan talk. That's always what I want from an action movie.

The story is pretty standard. An elite team has to get an asset to a destination while a country tries to stop them. I found it odd that the location is listed as Southern Asia. Why didn't this use an actual name? If it's due to the portray of corruption, then don't use any real names, don't even put text on the screen.
What is in essence a voice over is Wahlberg's character telling us about the events of the movie in a CIA interview after they've happened. It's a lot of exposition that's unnecessary.
All of the characters have quirks, but there's no benefit. Wahlberg's propensity to snap a rubber band on his wrist factors into nothing other than being annoying.  Lauren Cohen's character's daughter and ex husband (played by Peter Berg with his only appearance being on a phone screen) kind of comes back in one scene, but we didn't need all we got in the beginning.
John Malkovich is given a few quirks, but I don't know why I'm supposed to care about his shoes or his bobble head collection.He does have a bobble head collection, I'm not being sarcastic.

 

The ending has a bit of a twist that connects the beginning and end, but at that point I didn't care. That and on character spells out the reveal as if it wasn't already obvious.
What could have, and should have been a good action movie was wasted, and that's because of the weird editing. That took this movie from standard to baffling. This movie just wants to get me to the end for the surprise, but with that being the case cut out the narration and scenes that go along with it, cut the character development, and really cut a lot of the action scenes since they are edited so poorly. There is just no reason to see this.