Review of Mile 22 (2018) by Grant%20 D — 01 Oct 2018

Mile 22 follows James Silva (Mark Wahlberg) and his team of covert operatives as they attempt to get a man, who has valuable information which could stop potential future terrorist attacks, out of the country.

This film is terrible. Mark Wahlberg's character is quite possible the most arrogant and poorly written "intelligent" protagonist I've seen in a long time. My guess is that the writer wanted him to come off similar to how Mark Zuckerberg does in The Social Network: a super smart *******, but instead he comes off as a dude who thinks he is smarter than he actually is and just constantly yells at people. Lauren Cohan's character is also not written very well and her anger issues (spawning from her messy divorce) seem drastically overdramatic.

The story of Mile 22 isn't anything to write home about, either, as the entire film is about them trying to extract a police officer who says he has the codes needed to unlock a hard drive that has the locations of materials that could be used for terrorist attacks. That isn't really the problem, though, as my main issue with this film's story is how it tries to get the audience to play the guessing game of "who's the bad guy" while painting it on the wall in red paint. There's a huge reveal at the end where I'm guessing they thought the audience would be thinking "holy cow", but instead I was just severely disappointed. The editing in this film is also absolutely atrocious. In some fight scenes, there would be about three cuts between when someone goes to throw a punch and when it actually makes contact. It's completely disorienting and while I could still keep up with what was happening, it was honestly just too much. It got to the point where the constant cutting was seriously annoying me. The best thing about this film is the somewhat realistic gun play. That's basically the only positive thing I have to say.

Overall, this is one of the worst films I've watched in a long time. And I say this because generally whenever I give a film a very negative review I can at least say that it was a competently made film, but I can't say that for this one. It's bad all around.