Murray Close Courtesy of STXfilms
Mark Wahlberg stars in MILE 22
Mile 22 begins in scattershot, high-tech mayhem as a secret CIA commando team raids a Russian safehouse on a pleasant, tree-lined suburban street: seven dead and one big explosion before the credits begin to roll.
Although a last-minute twist ties together many loose ends and makes the plot almost interesting, Mile 22 is basically a non-interactive video game in which the CIA team (lead by Mark Wahlberg) must traverse the dangerous streets of a make-believe Southeast Asian city, guarding a defector with the secret behind missing nuclear material. Bullets fly, blood spurts, cars crash and burn, drones hover overhead—and everybody is kung-fu fighting. Tedium sets in. Mile 22 makes violence look dull.
Motor-mouthing Wahlberg spews a cut-and-paste dialogue full of trending terms—collusion, the fog of war, election hacking. Lauren Cohan plays an indestructible commando having trouble balancing work and family. The brightest moments come from John Malkovich as a CIA chief directing the carnage from afar. As usual, he is arrogantly fey, brilliantly supercilious and smugly above it all.
