Review: Mark Wahlberg and Iko Uwais team up for the bloody and muddled Mile 22

Mile 22 is the fourth collaboration between Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg, and shows that their relationship might just be getting a little too comfortable if this bloody and muddled film is the best the duo can come up with.

Wahlberg, who also produced the film, stars as Jimmy Silva, a member of an elite paramilitary squad known as “Overwatch,” the type of shadowy operation the US government employs when it doesn’t want to get its hands dirty. Following the film’s bloody opening, where an operation on a Russian safe house in a US suburb ends in a brutal shootout, we cut to 16 months later, where Silva and his partner Alice Kerr (Lauren Cohan) are in an Indonesian city, tasked with transporting informant Li Noor (The Raid’s Iko Uwais) to the airport in exchange for information about some missing chemical weapons.

While the distance to the airport is just 22 miles, the trio have to contend with Indonesian agents eager to stop Li from exiting the city by any means necessary. Most of the film’s lean 95-minute running time is made up of battles through the crowded Indonesian streets as Jimmy and Alice, with intelligence and drone-operated assistance from their remote team (including a totally underused John Malkovich in a disturbing wig), collaborate to find a way for the trio to reach the airport.

If that scenario sounds like it comes straight out of a video game, the film is often shot that way too, with non-step edits and scores of perfectly executed kill shots that feel like watching someone else play a particularly bloody Call of Duty session. (Jimmy and Alice’s frequent calls with their support team even sound like gamers playing online, complete with similar levels of trash-talk and f-bombs.)

Mile 22 ups the violence in ways that major releases rarely do anymore, with plenty of loud cracking bones and the sort of “Finish Him!” moves that fuelled mid-tier action movies in the 90’s. There is no denying that Iko Uwais is a stunningly talented martial artist, but the often cramped framing and rapid-fire editing often leave you clueless as to what’s going on, with the sound of a breaking bone or a blood splatter the only indication as to how the battles are progressing.

In The Raid films Uwais was mostly silent, letting the intense action scenes do the talking, but here he’s pressed to deliver actual dialogue, which mostly falls flat. On the flip side, Wahlberg’s character has some disorder that makes him think faster than everyone else around him while also causing him to quickly lose patience, which seems like a convenient excuse for Wahlberg to basically scream his way through the entire movie.

When he’s not lashing out and verbally abusing everyone on-screen, the film occasionally cuts to Wahlberg delivering extraneous dialogue at some future date, a device that Berg confusingly drops in-and-out of throughout the film. Basically channeling Josh Brolin’s character in Sicario (and its recent unfortunate sequel), Wahlberg drops dozens of hawkish politispeak one-liners about good and bad guys and securing the homeland, which often have nothing to do with the action happening on-screen. It’s a distracting device that only muddles the primary action scenes, and never has any concrete pay-off, other than giving Wahlberg’s character the chance to act like a grizzled vet that knows more about the real wold than anyone else (something we learn early on when he see him working on the “world’s most difficult” puzzle to unwind, as normal people tend to do).

The whole mess ends in an unsatisfying way that seems to be setting up a sequel, so even after 90+ minutes of breakneck action and frenetic editing there is no satisfying conclusion. While Mile 22 has a number of problems, watching Wahlberg scream-insult his entire team while Uwais finds innovative ways of detaching people’s limbs from their body is still an entertaining-enough summer diversion, even if it’s not the franchise-builder the filmmakers were hoping for.