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THE GUNMAN (2015) MOVIE NEWS & REVIEW

THE gunman (2015) movie

Genre | Action Thriller

Classification | MA 15+

Running time | 115 minutes

Released | 16 April 2015

cast

Sean Penn ... Terrier
Jasmine Trinca ... Annie
Javier Bardem ... Felix
Ray Winstone ... Stanley
Mark Rylance ... Terrance Cox
Idris Elba ... Barnes

director

Pierre Morel

writer

Jean-Patrick Manchette ... (novel)

Don MacPherson ... (screenplay) &
Pete Travis ... (screenplay) &
Sean Penn ... (screenplay)

cinematographer

Flavio Martínez Labiano

music

Marco Beltrami

film editor

Frédéric Thoraval

box office result

Worldwide $24,177,137

Australia $402,055

North America $10,664,749

the best dialogue

Barnes: Need a light? Mind if I sit down? I think I might have one with you. You ever have one of those days when every law is Murphy's Law? Everything's going wrong and everyone wants to kill you for something. Got some heavy shit going on up there today.
Terrier: Is that right?
Barnes: Oh yeah, one of the companies in that building got a surprise visit from Interpol. You know Interpol?

Felix: What do you keep, a diary? A diary of the horror we created? With the blood of all these women and grandpas and all those baby ones, little ones, floating in the river beside their toys. And you keep a diary of that? We have to look forward, Jim. Looking back, all we're doing is fucking and killing like animals. And you know a lot about that, especially about fucking and killing.

Cox: You always worry too much, Jim. The past is the past, my friend. Keep your eyes open, my friend. It's the ones who aren't after you that do you in the end.

THE GUNMAN (2015) MOVIE IMAGES

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THE GUNMAN (2015) STORY SYNOPSIS

Eight years after fleeing the Congo following his assassination of that country's minister of mining, former assassin Jim Terrier (Sean Penn) is back, suffering from PTSD and digging wells to atone for his violent past. After an attempt is made on his life, Terrier flies to London to find out who wants him dead -- and why. Terrier's search leads him to a reunion with Annie (Jasmine Trinca), a woman he once loved, who is now married to an oily businessman (Javier Bardem) with dealings in Africa.

THE GUNMAN (2015) MOVIE REVIEW

Reviewed by Mark Geraghty | Review date 15 April 2015
Pop Movee Rating ⭐⭐½

Sean Penn works to add a new dimension to his career, but violence-for-violence’s sake turns THE GUNMAN from an interesting premise into a film that is both hard-to-watch and difficult to empathize with. It's hard to imagine Sean Penn having anything other than Liam Neeson's TAKEN firmly planted in his mind when he signed on for THE GUNMAN. There are many parallels, not least among them being Neeson's career-reinventing outing was directed by Frenchman Pierre Morrel; the director of this new film. The sameness doesn't end there.

Penn plays Jim Terrier, who euphemistically describes himself as a former "Company Man"; whose less-than-desirable work practices catch up with him eight years down the track and force him back into a line-of-activity from which he has tried hard to escape. There's also the generic family member-love interest that needs to protected-rescued from the one-note villain, whose presence in the story is more conceptual than specific in nature. Despite the presence of the actor’s actor Sean Penn, THE GUNMAN's adherence to formulaic plotting and reliance on graphic violence prevent it from becoming more than the sum part of its action beats and marginalize its appeal to movie-goers.

The blame for many of THE GUNMAN's short-comings lie with Pierre Morrel, a director who had the lucky fortune to team-up with Liam Neeson back in 2008 to bring TAKEN to the screen. That film’s success is well documented, as is the influence it had on re-shaping Neeson’s career. Morrel’s point-and-shoot approach doesn’t work so well with Penn, whose career has been defined by inhabiting roles and getting his directors to work take-after-take to find the right moment and capture it. Morrel places far more importance on staging than he does acting, making sure that the fights, gun fire and explosions are all adequately covered so the action keeps moving at break-neck pace.

The absence of directorial finesse marginalizes both Penn’s performance along with his co-stars Jasmine Trinca, Javier Bardem and Mark Rylance. Javier Bardem’s performance deserves particular mention because it’s an absolute mess. His character devolves into a guilt-racked drunk as the film progresses, but he is almost completely incoherent and is no longer acting by his final scene. It’s a peculiar performance and, whether a by-product from a lack of quality raw footage or the result of poor film editing, the Spaniard wouldn’t want another performance like this any time soon. The only actors to make an impression in THE GUNMAN are Ray Winstone and Idris Elba, both of whom work hard to personalize their scenes with Penn, but, who in return, doesn’t seem to be giving as much as he’s getting from either colleague.

There’s also a lack of tone in THE GUNMAN, making viewing a challenge as the film’s relentless violence assaults the audience member’s senses in scene-after-scene. The film’s insistence at showing heads been ripped apart by gunfire is completely out-of-proportion with audience sensibilities and makes it difficult to mark the film down as an “enjoyable” experience. There’s also some questionable writing in the script by Penn, Don MacPherson and Pete Travis. The influence of Pete Travis, the director of the 2012 DREDD movie as well as 2008’s VANTAGE POINT, is apparent in the story’s ultra-violence and, in the right context (such as DREDD), it makes sense. THE GUNMAN should have been a different proposition. This was Sean Penn’s attempt to make himself into a mid-50’s action player in a film that aimed to tell the story of a fundamentally good person who was searching for atonement for his questionable past. What THE GUNMAN turns out to be is a film that relies too much on formulaic plot contrivances, is too reliant on gun-toting action sequences and sledgehammer’s its audience with gratuitous violence.