MILE 22 (2018) MOVIE NEWS & REVIEW

Mile 22 (2018) movie

Genre              |   Action Thriller

Classification   |   TBA

Running time   |   100+ minutes

Released         |   23 August 2018

cast

Mark Wahlberg ... James Silva
Lauren Cohan ... Alice
John Malkovich ... Bishop
Ronda Rousey ... Sam Snow
​Iko Uwais ... Li Noor

director

​Peter Berg

writer

​Lea Carpenter
Graham Roland

cinematographer

Jacques Jouffret ... director of photography

music

Jeff Russo

film editor

​Melissa Lawson Cheung
Colby Parker Jr.

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box office result

Worldwide               $59 million

Australia                 $1.7 million

North America        $36 million

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the best dialogue

Li Noor: Say hi to your mother for me.

James Silva: Are you feeling calm, Alice?
Alice Kerr: No, not even a little bit. Are you?
James Silva: Me? I'm totally calm.
Alice Kerr: That's because you're mentally unstable.
James Silva: Thank you.

Anatole Kuragin: [In Russian] You're making a mistake
James Silva: [In Russian] I've made a lot of those

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MILE 22 (2018) MOVIE IMAGES

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Posters

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MILE 22 (2018) STORY SYNOPSIS

In a visceral modern thriller from the director of LONE SURVIVOR, Mark Wahlberg stars as James Silva, an operative of the CIA’s most highly-prized and least understood unit. Aided by a top-secret tactical command team, Silva must retrieve and transport an asset who holds life-threatening information to Mile 22 for extraction before the enemy closes in.

MILE 22 (2018) MOVIE REVIEW

Reviewed by Mark Geraghty   |   Review date 19 September 2018
Pop ​Movee Rating ⭐⭐½

Mark Wahlberg and Peter Berg have collaborated on a number of “based on real events” films, including LONE SURVIVOR, DEEPWATER HORIZON and, most recently, PATRIOTS DAY. With MILE 22, the pair are back together for something a little different… An Action Thriller laced with geopolitics, the new “Cold War” and a reassessment of America’s place in world order. It’s an intriguing premise, but not one that either Wahlberg or Berg sustain with any real momentum. On the surface, MILE 22 looks like a surefire winner for Wahlberg. It’s right in his performance “hitting zone”; nothing overly dramatic and a lot of physicality to the role. Unfortunately, after only a few minutes of MILE 22, it’s Wahlberg’s performance that confines MILE 22 to the “could have been” scrapheap of the Action genre...

MILE 22 opens with a literal bang! Wahlberg is James Silva, a “GO TO” covert operations specialist who the American government turn to when all other security measures fail. The opening prologue sees Silva and his team infiltrate a Russian safe house on American soil in search of crucial information that has the potential to expose US intelligence information to the wrong people.

It’s amazing to think, for the last thirty years there’s been more or less an absence of Cold War politics from American entertainment...

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the era of Soviet Glasnost brought about a change in the global geopolitical landscape that millions around the world believed was a change for the better and for good. However, the emergence of nouveau Dictators like Vladimir Putin, Kim Jong Un and Bashar Al-Assad have brought about a more extreme response from the oldest democracies such as the United States.

In 2016, the citizens of the US embraced Donald Trump and his inward looking political views that sought to “Make America Great Again”. America, in its role as chief provider of entertainment to the Western World, has, in the push and shove of global politics, begun once again to openly identify Russians as the stock “Blackhats”, going to extreme lengths to damage and humiliate America at every opportunity.  While unfortunate to contemplate, films such as MILE 22 do influence the way some people develop their opinions about the way the world functions and the “Good Guys” versus “Bad Guys” distillation of perspectives does nothing to make things better. All it does is fuel the tension and distrust, much the same way McCarthyism did throughout the middle decades of the 20th Century.

To steal a lyric from the late, great David Bowie, the opening minutes of MILE 22 do a handy job of “putting out the fire with gasolene”...

MILE 22 writers Graham Roland, currently producing the John Karasinski JACK RYAN TV series, and newcomer Lea Carpenter, make it clear form the start of their screenplay that, underneath all the action, stunts and set-pieces, the story’s theme is an old-fashioned “Us” versus “Them”, with Russians standing in for the “Them”.

Carpenter, who has sole screenplay credit, makes an effort to “colour” circumstances, as all good Action Thriller writers should.There’s double agents, triple agents, there’s subterfuge, there’s double crosses and a fair amount of intrigue. It’s quite a lot for a 95 minute movie to cram in and, yet, somehow, MILE 22 still manages to go wide of the target.

Why?

Two words…

James Silva.

Given Mark Wahlberg’s status as an “above the title” actor these days, there’s no doubt that he was involved in the development of this character. Actors with his amount of box office success provide plenty of notes about how they want their character to be written. It’s logical to conclude, in the case of the character he plays in MILE 22, that Wahlberg wanted James Silva to be an obnoxious dick head.

Rarely has there been a character as unsympathetic as James Silva. Sure, Carpenter and Roland create enough background story to justify why Silva is the way he is, but that’s no reason to keep the character on the same trajectory for the entire course of the film. It’s clear that Mark Wahlberg decided he wanted to play a different type of character and the way to do achieve that is have Silva written in a manner that is against type. Viewers know that Wahlberg can be funny and charming when he wants to be, but, in MILE 22, it’s as if he woke up on the wrong side of the bed and decided he was going to stay that way for the entire film.

He’s the quintessential douchebag!

It’s no surprise, given how big an assehole Silva is, that every other character in MILE 22 looks sympathetic by comparison. Even the story’s antagonists are more appealing than Silva and, at points throughout the film, it’s no surprise to be more than a little disappointed that they meet their demise at his hand.

To rub salt into the wound, MILE 22 also takes out the majority of Silva’s team as well! It would seem that no one is either psychologically or physically safe from the damage that this guy does...

The best thing about MILE 22 is THE WALKING DEAD actress Lauren Cohan, who plays Silva’s second-in-charge Alice Kerr. What makes Cohan stand out is that she’s the only character in the story who has anything that even closely resembles the kind of life to which the viewer may be able to relate.

She’s a working mother. She’s going through an ugly divorce. She’s misses her daughter…

To the writer’s credit they don’t make Alice a victim of circumstance. She’s smart, tough and has been in the covert operations game long enough to look after herself. It may not sit well with some viewers, but in one key scene through the middle section of the film, she uses her “emotional vulnerability” as a Mother to dispose of one of her assailants without thinking twice about it.

If MILE 22 were to do JOHN WICK type box office, there may be cause for the film’s financiers to seriously consider a follow-up story. If that were the case, there’s a very strong case to be made that the fate of Alice would be a key plot element for any sequel to explore… The film certainly isn’t shy about dropping a few bread crumbs along the way to signal to the audience that there’s more where this came from.

Surprisingly, Ronda Rousey,  Iko Uwais and John Malkovich don’t have as much impact as their respective fan bases might have hoped.

As a member of Silva’s team, Rousey’s Sam Snow is a solid physical presence but it little more than a blunt-force instrument, shooting, punching and kicking her way through the story. Given Rousey’s MMA background, she’s perfect for the role she plays but she’s not winning any dramatic awards for this effort.

Iko Uwais is best known from THE RAID: REDEMPTION and THE RAID 2; two of the finest ultra-violent Action films to be released this decade. So influential are these two films that much of the Second and Third Act of MILE 22 are based upon the 2011 and 2014 Gareth Evans films starring Uwais. MILE 22 doesn’t do as much as it could have with Uwais’ character - Li Noor - but, by the end of the film, it becomes clear why this is the case.

As with Lauren Cohan’s character, what happens to Uwais’ Noor is, without doubt, something that could be expanded upon if a follow-up to MILE 22 were to proceed.

Perhaps the biggest disappointment of MILE 22 is John Malkovich…

That’s not to say Malkovich is bad. His acting lifts the overall performance level of the film. The problem with his character is that he’s not really necessary. It’s as if Malkovich became available to appear in the film, but Berg and his casting team didn’t have a role to warrant an actor of his calibre in the film.

So...

After a little bit of head scratching and some hasty rewrites, Bishop, the covert operations project manager becomes a slightly bigger role and Malkovich is shoehorned into the production to provide some “name” co-star support. Maybe that’s a bit harsh, but there just never seems quite enough for him to do. It seems an awful waste of such a talented actor.

Then again, the whole film feels like something of a missed opportunity.

The Verdict...

Without sounding like Wahlberg and Berg have deliberately held back with MILE 22, there are hints, nudges and clues that this film is nothing more than an elaborate launching pad for an ongoing series of films about the exploits of James Silva and his efforts to keep the balance between his version of “Right” and “Wrong”.

There’s some strong evidence to suggest there’s more to come (if the film finds an audience).

The biggest clue is in the “flashback” story device used, allowing Silva to lay out events as they unfolded for the benefit of those seeking to establish how his mission could have gone so horribly wrong in the first instance. Flashback stories are always frustrating because they telegraph the whereabouts of the character explaining what happened. When a secondary character is given this expository task, it’s not so bad, but, in the the case of MILE 22, Silva - the film’s main character - is the cypher!

With a little more creativity, Carpenter and Roland could have come up with a story device that allowed the fate of the main character to be a pivot point for the story up to the closing scenes of the film. Alas, it’s not the case and MILE 22 is the worse it. Not only is Wahlberg’s Silva one the least likeable leading characters to grace a cinema screen in recent memory but, in spite of his atrocious personality, the audience knows early on in the story that he gets away without so much as a scratch on him.

Perhaps, if the film’s producers had gone the extra mile to think through some of the film’s obvious shortcomings and spent less time manufacturing an ending that leaves so much unanswered, then - perhaps - the thought of accompanying James Silva on another sortie may have been one for audiences to look forward to. Unfortunately, on the strength of MILE 22, that’s not a mission anyone would choose to accept…

Then again, at least it’s better than THE PREDATOR...

MILE 22 (2018) USEFUL LINKS

Mile 22 - Wikipedia
​Mile 22 (2018) - IMDb
​Mile 22 (2018) - Rotten Tomatoes

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