Review: Mile 22 is a spectacularly awful action film

Director: Peter Berg

Writers: Graham Roland and Lea Carpenter

Starring: Mark Wahlberg, Lauren Cohan, Ronda Rousey, Iko Uwais, John Malkovich, and Carlos Alban

Runtime: 1 hour and 35 minutes (95 minutes)

MPAA Rating: R (for strong violence and language throughout)

Holy hell, Peter Berg’s Mile 22 is a RIDE. I didn’t have super high expectations for this one but Peter Berg has made some really solid films such as Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon, and Friday Night Lights. He usually helms great dramas with well-written scripts, good action/setpieces, and great acting.

Mile 22 basically trades all of that in for what is perhaps what is simultaneously the worst movie I’ve seen in 2018 and also one of the most entertaining due to how bad it is. Mile 22 is a mess, plain and simple, but it fails in spectacular fashion.

The film follows a group of special ops agents who must extract a target to an airplane 22 miles away. The target holds valuable information that could prevent catastrophic Hiroshima-scale disasters across the globe, the only issue is that the extraction isn’t as cut and dry as it should be. They have a limited amount of time to get to the extraction point before they lose access to a disc containing vital information and there are some very persistent foes attempting to assassinate the group and their VIP.

Sounds like a pretty good premise, right? High stakes, lots of tension created by the fact they’re driving through very populated areas and have to be careful of casualties and their vulnerable surroundings, and so on. It should be something that’s at the very least good popcorn fun and it almost is but not in the way it intends to be.

Mark Wahlberg plays James Silva, the leader of this group known only as Overwatch. He’s incredibly dangerous and his mind works at a mile a minute, think The Accountant or Rain Man, and he’s pretty unhinged. Almost every single scene he is in is just him being the biggest possible asshole he can be.

After an opening action sequence, he and two of his crew members are sitting at a cafe talking about this operation they’re working on. One of two female members, Sam (Rhonda Rousey), has a piece of cake brought to her on a plate. Wahlberg sits there, puzzled and inquires about the cake. Rousey’s character responds by telling him it’s her birthday. He then proceeds to shout “NO BIRTHDAY CAKE!” and throws the plate and cake on the ground in the middle of this restaurant.

Everyone just stares at him and then he continues talking as usual until the scene ends. This is just his entire character throughout the entire movie. He has another scene where he walks into a room where a woman is attempting to hack into the locked disc with the vital information they need. She tells him how difficult it is and then randomly says something along the lines of “Didn’t you graduate from Harvard with Mark Zuckerberg?”

“I didn’t go to Harvard,” she says. Then a man next to her says “Zuckerberg didn’t graduate.” Wahlberg than proceeds to lose his shit at both of them and goes on this long spiel about Hiroshima. At this point, I’m watching the movie in utter amazement. Wahlberg is giving the performance of his life, it’s so off the rails and bad that its nothing short of marvelous.

Mark Wahlberg acts like he is on speed throughout the entirety of this movie and it’s quite possibly the funniest performance he has given since The Happening in 2008. I won’t even mention the fact that there’s almost a fourth-wall break in the movie that is in reference to an SNL sketch parodying Mark Wahlberg (credit to Matt Singer of Screencrush for tweeting about this).

The film tries to match Wahlberg’s almost ADD-like personality with some of the worst possible editing and cinematography to come out of a summer blockbuster this year. The film is shot in such a claustrophobic way, you’re constantly really close to everyone’s faces, it gets SUPER tight. In some movies of this nature, this technique is used to create high tension and anxiety but it does it in simple dialogue scenes before the action gets underway in the movie… just simple office jargon.

The camera is wildly shaky too, it feels like the camera operator was vibrating across the set as he shot everything. You know how in The Office it’s shot as a handheld documentary? Imagine that in less competent hands for an action movie.

The editing in Mile 22 is incredibly bewildering, I was floored by what I was watching. There’s a mixture of kung-fu-esque fight sequences with the VIP (The Raid and The Raid 2’s Iko Uwais) they’re trying to extract and intense gunfights on the streets of Southeast Asia and in grimy apartment buildings. Sometimes, you catch a glimpse at a really cool moment like when one character stuck in the back of an SUV and slides an enemy’s neck back and forth across a broken window to slice his throat with broken glass.

There are really brutal and awesome moments like this sprinkled throughout but the vast majority of the action is incoherent. There are so many rapid cuts that it feels like the editor’s coffee was laced with ecstasy and shots of Red Bull, there’s one particularly egregious example during a gunfight in a bakery. There are one or two enemies walking into the store and another character shoots them. In less than probably one second, we get three different shots.

Shot 1, the bullet(s) hitting the bad guy(s). Shot 2, the bad guys falling down. Shot 3, another angle of the bad guys falling down and laying on the ground. These three cuts happen in literally a blink of an eye, it’s so unnecessary. You only need one of those shots, just let the action play out! The more cutting there is, the more disoriented the viewer gets and makes it much more difficult to process what’s happening.

There are times where that rapid-fire editing can be used as an effective technique to create that feeling of overwhelming chaos but it should be done sparingly in order to ensure its effectiveness. As the movie reaches its end (which comes very quickly thanks to its 90-minute runtime), the action gets harder and harder to follow.

What is perhaps the most frustrating thing about Mile 22 is its lack of willingness to commit to a message. At the start of the film, these characters talk about the weight of their actions and how dark their job is. These are supposed to be soldiers who operate under the radar while the government turns a blind eye to their questionable tactics.

The only thing is, Peter Berg never shows anything that messed up or morally unjust. They shoot the bad guys and… that’s it. There’s one instance where they threaten to torture someone but that’s as extreme as it gets, there’s no moral ambiguity, they feel totally within their right.

There’s one side character who has maybe a maximum of two minutes of screentime who controls a drone who is really eager to use the drone’s weaponry and when he finally does, he shows no remorse. He plays it off like a video game, yelling in excitement and laughter. It was super jarring, the film has no established themes or tone making it totally unclear what the message is trying to be.

Is it a wannabe Sicario, trying to shine a light on the “dark deeds of the government”? Well, it fails miserably at that and Day of the Soldado is by far the better film. Is it a fun action movie? No, it botches that quite a bit as well. The whole picture comes across as a disjointed mess which only has fleeting moments of enjoyment through Marky Mark’s hopped-up performance of whisper-yelling and the handful of well-executed action segments.

I can’t in good faith recommend you go to the theater and see this but if it pops up on Netflix one night, you could knock back a couple beers and get some good laughs at this totally bonkers attempt to kickstart start a multi-media franchise spanning across film, television, and even VR. No, I didn’t make that up, I swear.