Mile 22 (2018)
Directed by Peter Berg
An elite group of American operatives, aided by a top-secret tactical command team, must transport an asset who holds life-threatening information to an extraction point 22 miles away through the hostile streets of an Asian city.
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5 films that influenced Mile 22
What critics say influenced Mile 22
At its essence, “Mile 22” is part “Sicario”, part “The Raid”, and all deeply terrible.
Similarly, the ultra-violent Sicario movies can be read as indictments of the drug war.
The directing trio of François Simard, Anouk Whissell and Yoann-Karl Whissell gave us the pop culture pastiche of "Turbo Kid" in 2015.
Perhaps the most insulting fact about Mile 22 is that it steals its protagonist from The Accountant and its perceived plot from Mission: Impossible - Fallout , while stripping away everything that made those films special, replacing it with mindless explosions and shoot outs.
Berg's established a bizarre shorthand with the actor through multiple collaborations, and now they've essentially made a companion piece to The Accountant ; only every probably autistic tic isn't exploited as a superpower (as in Ben Affleck's equally baffling pulp assassin tale), but rather an excuse for Silva to just be a giant dickhead.
The character that Wahlberg plays is apparently super-intelligent and autistic ala Ben Affleck in Gavin O’Connor‘s The Accountant , and yet he does the same venomous arrogant scumbag performance like he did in Martin Scorcese‘s The Departed ; and yet he’s the lead.
It’s like a degraded and darkly pulped version of them, with editing so fast it’s almost pointillistic and surveillance scenes — greatly influenced by the underrated “Jason Bourne” (2016) — that suggest there isn’t a corner of the world, or your bedroom, that the government can’t get into.
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The hints doled out over the course of the movie—not only in those Russian interludes but in excerpts of Silva being interviewed post factum by some shadowy government types—finish in a big reveal that aims for the sort of shock “The Usual Suspects” achieved, but instead comes off as contrived as the ridiculous “Martha” moment between Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne in “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.”