Space for the cut...
Coming off a 2 year hiatus here, and no I'm not going to bother with superhero films at all anymore. I wanted to, but writing about them has proven to be surprisingly boring. Plus, at this point every possible angle on every superhero film to be released since Batman vs Superman completely failed to be the spark for the DCU Warner Brothers wanted has already been explored, so what's the point?
So, let's get back to the more obscure stuff. The kind of movies that my friends will only watch if I'm paying for it (and with good reason!). Today we'll take on Mile 22, a mostly disappointing film that managed to score a cinematic release entirely because we can't admit Marky Mark is really only good for Michael Bay or straight-to-dvd films yet.
If you've seen the trailer for Mile 22, then you know the setup. It's every CIA/Black Ops team that exists outside the law/off the reservation/where only eagles soar/whatever the fuck cliche we're using this week is. The hook for this one is that Overwatch (this weeks team) basically setup individual ops for emergency situations, and disband back into regular CIA afterwards. Today's emergency comes in the form of Iko Uwais (who to be fair is an emergency to unbroken limbs within 5 metres), wanting asylum from Indonesia in exchange for the location of missing nuclear material. Overwatch needs to get him out of the country within a couple of hours, or a disk drive he's encrypted with a countdown to self erasure will take all it's info with it. Neat way of basically putting them on the clock to give him asylum.
You read the title, so let's not beat around the bush anymore. For an action movie with a decent budget and ok set pieces, it's a hilarious waste of the talent available. Iko Uwais basically steals the show, with Lauren Cohan coming in a close second. The rest of the cast/shooting though...hoo boy. From the top:
Marky Mark - we know he can be reasonably charming when he wants to be, and that he can handle an action movie. In this, he's playing a character who's supposed to be some kind of savant with anger issues. Problem is, all we get is the anger issues, and in a fairly boring kind of way as well. We've all seen Sherlock, we know what a "charming" dickhead can look like, and that's not on display here. Not a single one liner worth remembering.
John Malkovich - He must have some bills to pay. Playing the Overwatch controller, all he does is spout random historical quotes out of context and not really do much else. Slumming it about sums this up.
The fight choreography - decent in the fights where Uwais is fighting on his own against other trained stuntmen. When everyone else gets involved it reverts to close up shakeycam to hide the fact that noone else in the film can even come close. It has the effect of making Uwais come across as far scarier than the Overwatch team as a whole, although weirdly that's actually kind of relevant.
Rhonda Rousey - Got it worse than anyone. Without getting too specific, this movie is a worse waste of her talents than the time her UFC coach told her to stop using her wrestling skills in the ring.
Coming back around, Uwais is great in this, even if his talents are still criminally underused. He's got the best fights by far, and his acting is actually noticeably improving. Which is pretty awesome - you don't often see that in martial arts stars. It's a pity they have to shoot a heap of his fights like shit to make him stop showing up everyone else. Lauren Cohan gets a decent run as well, at least partly because her character is the only person who's actually a character in the whole piece. If we're being honest, Cohan and Uwais should have got top billing in the credits.
One of the biggest problems Mile 22 has is that the good serious Hollywood action movies are getting far better these days. They're learning to keep the plot simple and go hard on the choreography (John Wick), or they're keeping above average choreography and keeping the plot tight (Atomic Blonde). Mile 22 doesn't really hit either of these heights. It just kind of ambles on, hoping that you haven't seen anything better. It really just serves to make such films seem better by comparison. Which is a shame, because it demonstrated a basic grasp of how to shoot a fight scene, has a pretty decent cast, and still just can't follow through. That said, I did cackle loud enough at the end to disturb the people in the cinema with me, although I suspect that's because they were taking it more seriously than me.
At the end of the day Mile 22 is really only worth watching on Netflix or as a rental. Or, if we're friends, borrowing it off me. Because you know I'll buy anything with Iko Uwais in it regardless of how good it actually is.
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