Mile 22 is a high octane, highly realistic military action thriller, starring Mark Wahlberg, that ends with a gut-wrenching twist that no one saw coming from a thousand miles.
read more
Mile 22 is a high-octane, highly realistic military action thriller film directed by Peter Berg and stars Mark Wahlberg in the main lead in his fourth collaboration with Berg. Previously, they have worked together on Lone Survivor (2013), Patriots Day (2016), and Deepwater Horizon (2016). Wahlberg is perfectly cast as a highly intelligent and hyperactive paramilitary operative, James Silva. No surprise there, given that Wahlberg is also one of the film’s producers and the role was specially written for him, highlighting his strengths as a physically-oriented actor as we have seen in his previous films, The Italian Job (2003), and Max Payne (2008), and The Fighter (2010). Co-starring with Wahlberg is Hollywood newcomer, but famed Indonesian martial arts star Iko Uwais of The Raid and Headshot films.
Silva, who heads an elite and covert CIA task force (a team of three, one of whom is Walking Dead actress Lauren Cohan), has to safely escort Uwais’ mysterious character, Li Noor, for 22 miles from the American embassy to an extraction point at the airfield while being hunted by local terrorists. One can see it as a horizontal version of The Raid.
Mile 22 is unapologetically an action film through and through. Action scenes are well choreographed, but are shot and edited in highly fragmented way typical of American action movies today. As such, it can be difficult to follow some of the action sequences. Otherwise, we get to see Uwais in action and he’s great, albeit underused, in his second major Hollywood role.
The film, unfortunately, sacrifices character development to keep the action and the pace of the movie relentless. The most well fleshed out character, besides Wahlberg’s, is Cohan’s Alice Kerr, Silva’s fierce and headstrong ballbusting colleague, who is also a mother and recent divorcee. The nature of her job means that she has to spend months overseas away from her daughter. This backstory makes her the character in the movie whom we care about most, and perhaps wouldn’t have existed were it not for the screenwriter and novelist Lea Carpenter, whom we should also credit for crafting a relatively intelligent and down-to-earth that ends with a gut-wrenching twist that no one saw coming from a thousand miles.
read less