Movie Reaction: Mile 22

Formula: 16 Blocks * 176

Allow me to psychoanalyze Peter Berg for a moment based solely on his work as a director of film and TV. I don't think he has a lot of God-given talent as a director. In fact, his first impulse is to be a bit of a hack: prone to the type of excess attributed to Michael Bay at his worst. And I think he knows that. Still, he's managed to put together an impressive catalog of work over the years. How did he do that? Well, hard work and discipline, I believe. Think of it like this. Alcoholics can function perfectly well in the world. They just have to work a little harder at things that other people don't. They can't take as much for granted. They have to be aware of their demons and work hard to be better than them. Some alcoholics even manage to channel that addictive personality to be better at other things. Maybe they do better at their job because it's a good distraction or they focus on maintaining good relationships with friends and family, knowing the value of that support system.

Now that I''ve compare one of my favorite directors to an alcoholic, let me backtrack. You can see Berg's excess back in his debut feature, Very Bad Things. That comedy about friends trying to keep a very dark secret goes off the rails by the end. It's too much. Like he took the title as a challenge. Then you have the minor miracle that is The Rundown, which is more controlled, striking the right balance between the excess that he's prone to and the groundedness of his best work. His latest string of movies - Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon, and Patriots Day - are his strongest run of films because he stops himself just short of sensationalizing things.

Berg knows his strengths. He is excellent at showing how normal people react to elevated or extraordinary circumstances. He directed the pilot and reboot episodes of Friday Night Lights: a show about regular people who attach an absurd amount of importance to their high school football team. Or, there's pilot for The Leftovers that he directed: a show about how regular people respond to a seemingly supernatural event. I love Deepwater Horizon, because he turns it into a Hollywood disaster movie without ever hitting a false note in regards to the real events that it's based on. When Berg is in control and self-aware enough, he is a great director.

Mile 22, to stick with the alcoholism metaphor, is a relapse. Or maybe a better metaphor is that it's the release valve being opened so the entire dam doesn't break. I imagine that one day Berg just got tired of holding it all in and said, "Dammit, I want to make an action movie, and it's going to be over-the-top and in-your-face and blow things up and - just - everything. Everything." He wanted to make something critic-proof that didn't need a good Metacritic score, a festival premiere, or awards buzz.

I did not like Mile 22. Like, at all.

The premise is pretty familiar: move an asset from point A to point B while a bunch of people try to kill you. More specifically, Mark Wahlberg, Lauren Cohan, Rhonda Rousey, and some other redshirts are members of an elite covert CIA force. They are all-purpose badasses. One day, a man (Iko Uwais) shows up at the American embassy in whatever country the studio's marketing department said is OK to call corrupt. He has a disk with valuable information that's going to explode in 8 hours unless someone puts in a code that only he knows. He will give them the code as long as they put him on a plane to the U.S. for safety. The CIA arranges a pickup 22 miles away. Wahlberg's team is in charge of escorting Uwais. Of course, everything goes to hell midway through, and they have to shoot their way to safety.

I like this kind of bare-bones storytelling a lot of the time. The movie is brief (nearly 90 minutes). Ideally, the movie doesn't get bogged down in details, gives the characters simple but endearing personalities, executes the action in clear and entertaining fashion, and ends before the audience can get tired of it. 22 Miles manages to fail at almost all of that. Or rather, I should say, the decisions made were not ones that appealed to me as an audience member.

I'll start with the characters. Wahlberg's James Silva is a complete miscalculation. He's supposed to be a brilliant loose cannon. The problem is, he just comes off as a prick. He's a jerk to everyone. The moments when he proves that he's smart are just him showing off like a bratty child. He also has this annoying tic. He has a rubber band he snaps on his wrist to calm him. Berg REALLY likes pointing out how much Wahlberg does this. It's supposed to show how close he is to snapping at any moment. Instead, it's just an annoying tic that turns me against Wahlberg before he even opens his mouth. Cohan is the only other team member with a discernible personality. She's a divorced mother. This job keeps her from seeing her kid. She also has some anger issues. However, it turns out that anger isn't enough to build an entire character around, let alone two characters.

Weirdly, there's both too many characters and not enough in the movie. Wahlberg, Cohan, and Uwais are the only characters who's names anyone would know coming out of the movie (I don't remember their names, but theoretically, one could learn them). It's a large team though. There are a half dozen others who work on the ground with Wahlberg and Cohan. Then John Malkovich runs the computer operation at a secret location. There are a few computer programmers with lines. The team is too big for everyone to get personalities, so even late into the movie, I don't know who most of the people are. That sure makes it hard to care when someone turns out to be a mole. I should at least know the characters well enough to be able to tell when one of them is acting suspicious.

I didn't like the action the movie. Tropes like good guys having perfect accuracy and villains wasting hundreds of rounds of ammo without a direct hit are so common, that I can't single it out here. The thing that really bothered me about the movie's action is a little hard to define. The action just came from an ugly place. I'm perfectly fine with some violence in movies. The pain of the characters isn't what I like though. Take Iko Uwais for example. He's best known for The Raid movies. Those are wall-to-wall fighting movies. Uwais essentially fights his way out of a building full of armed mercenaries by himself in the first movie. And I loved it. The fight scenes are amazingly choreographed and inventive. It never got dull. Mile 22 has Uwais kicking ass in similar ways, but the focus is less on his moves and more on the pain he's inflicting on the other person. It's the difference between focusing on a kick or the broken leg that results from the kick. Mile 22 seems to relish the broken leg moments. Berg wants to let the audience know that these people feel pain. It's ugly and I don't like it. More generally speaking though, it's not shot that well either. There's a lot of cutting. I had a hard time mapping out the geography of any room. Normally Berg's movies are pretty good at stuff like that. Not this time.

Mile 22 was nothing but shortcuts [ironically enough for a movie about transporting a person from one location to another]. It creates characters with the broadest of outlines. The movie is structured around Wahlberg in some sort of briefing, telling some superiors what went down after the fact. It's not clear who he's talking to or why. Is he in trouble? Do they think he's some kind of double agent? Is he just clearing up some details? I don't know. Mostly, the interview segments are used as an easy way to convey information that the movie wasn't able to clearly explain otherwise. It's a cheat.

On paper, this looked like exactly the kind of movie Berg could make well. Ideally, it's a "people doing their damn job" movie* with a few skilled people performing a difficult task. Wahlberg is a proven lead for a movie like this. Cohan has enough Walking Dead training to believably pull off being a badass. Uwais could add a new flavor to a standard shoot 'em up. I'm not sure what happened. This is a bad movie.

*These are movies about people who are good at their jobs doing their jobs well. They don't rely on contrivances in the plot to make things interesting. The job is difficult enough on its own that it's interesting to watch as it is.

After the Credits

Apparently, Berg and Wahlberg were hoping that Mile 22 would launch a franchise for them. I'm not sure what about this is franchise-able though. Wahlberg's character is nowhere near engaging to follow through several movies. Every other protagonist gets killed, so there's no team to build around. The secret CIA force is too wrapped up in mystery to be a recognizable brand. 

Think about it. If this does get a sequel, how would any audience know from a trailer that it's a sequel? Wahlberg's character doesn't have a name or look you recognize 10 minutes after the movie ends (unless they call it "The Rubber Band Man"). There's no character continuity beyond Wahlberg and I guess Uwais. "Mile 22" is specific to this mission. You can't make "Mile 22 2" or "Mile 23". The 22 miles aren't even that integral to the story to be that distinctive. If they try to get cute and make "Minute 22" or "22 Degrees" no one would recognize it. They could pull a Sicario and make "Mile 22: Covert Ops", but that wouldn't make much sense. Was Mile 22 a production name that they forgot to update before it went to print?