Muddled Action Thriller 'Mile 22' Should Have Pulled Off At Mile 3 Or So

CIA officer James Silva (Mark Wahlberg) escorts Li Noor (Iko Uwais) in Mile 22.
STXfilms
After four consecutive movies together, director Peter Berg and star Mark Wahlberg want to make honest men of one another and turn their fruitful partnership into a proper franchise. The violent, opaque, tonally scrambled, but— surprisingly! — not-idea-starved action thriller Mile 22 is fully declassified in its bid for sequeldom.

Like so many genre exercises with high-style aspirations — 2016's feature Atomic Blonde and the first season of the HBO series True Detective are recent examples — this muddled shoot-'em-up uses the framing device of a post-operational debriefing to allow its hero to narrate its events in hindsight, peppering his account with time-is-a-flat-circle pseudo-profundities.

"Diplomacy rarely works once the match has been lit to start the fire," broods the Artist Formerly Known as Marky Mark (Known Associates: The Funky Bunch), radiating a distinct absence of good vibrations.

Wahlberg is clearly trying to stretch a little with his performance as James Silva, a cranky, motor-mouthed operative of the C.I.A.'s super-duper-secret service "Ground Branch," who's implied to be on the autism spectrum. A caffeinated montage of his early life over the opening credits shows us his mother giving him a rubber band to snap against his wrist when he feels overwhelmed, and Berg cuts to the now-fortysomething Silva fidgeting with his band throughout the balance of the movie.

It's a less grating device than the frequent use of aerial surveillance footage, which "Overwatch" leader John Malkovich uses to direct the actions of his shooters on the ground, occasionally ordering his squad of hackers to change traffic lights from red to green, or in more dire scenarios, launch missiles via drone. Anyway, much of the meager pleasure the movie delivers come from watching Wahlberg and his lieutenant, The Walking Dead's Lauren Cohan, play warriors whose only sop to likability comes from their competence. Competence always plays.