Mile 22 is easily the most frustrating and the most baffling moviegoing experience I’ve had this year, but what surprised me was in the weird specificity on how it became frustrating and baffling. The film is written by Lea Carpenter (fun fact, she’s apparently in the Du Pont family) and directed by Peter Berg. You usually know what to expect when it comes to Berg’s work, especially in recent years – the right leaning politics, sprinkles of xenophobia, exploitation of real events, fetishism of the military or any other form of authority, just imagine Michael Bay if he was actually capable of making prestige films. Mile 22 features all his typical trademarks, but it also stands out in a very odd way.
The is about an elite and secretive US task force led by James Silva (Mark Wahlberg). They are given a mission to extract a local cop, Li Noor (Iko Uwais), in some unspecified Southeast Asian country who has the locations of missing radioactive material around the world. They have to traverse 22 miles of hostile territory so they can get him on a plan to the US, and get the password to the hard drive that will disclose the locations. So, basically get the human MacGuffin from Point A to Point B, it’s as simple as that.
Or is it? I guess that’s a good enough place to start. Like I said, the movie has a lot of the same troubling elements we’ve seen in many of Berg’s films. It’s a film about a group of (mostly white) soldiers wreaking bloody havoc on an onslaught of nameless brown bodies. It preys on the kind of ignorance and paranoia that will make the MAGA crowd cheer on the relentless violence. But hey, a huge chunk of my cinematic diet growing up was problematic action junk, so as long as the action is engaging, I could potentially overlook certain things. Even with a film I didn’t like, Patriots Day, I can still acknowledge that the Watertown shootout is easily among the best action set pieces in recent memory.
Unfortunately, despite a solid, simple setup, the film is quick to ruin everything with its absolutely incomprehensible editing. Geography is rarely established, you can rarely tell what a character is doing to another, people will seem like they’re in one place only for a later shot revealing they’re actually somewhere else entirely. Plus, the narrative momentum is constantly interrupted by these quick scenes that I assume is meant to be some kind of framing device, where James is talking to some suits about the mission after the fact, but it’s pointless and grinds everything to a halt, no matter how quick they go by. It’s strange because Berg has been a fairly solid action director, and he is working with his usual editor. The choreography is also pretty good in the few moments where you can make out what’s going on, and it’s got a nastiness to it that I love, so I cannot fathom why he went with this approach here. It’s especially shameful when all the joy of seeing Iko Uwais in action is stripped away because you can’t tell what’s happening.
The characters are also not particularly interesting. Although, I will say that Mark Wahlberg is at his most Mark Wahlberg here, and seeing him try to act like he’s on the spectrum, which I guess he interpreted as “someone doing a Mark Wahlberg impression” but with a few ticks here and there like the way he constantly snaps a rubber band on his wrist. It’s amazing to watch, and in all the wrong ways. But it at least made for the one really entertaining aspect of the picture. Everyone else is just bland. John Malkovich is just here to bark orders while staring at computer screens far from the action. Lauren Cohan, Ronda Rousey, Carlo Alban are in the team led by Mark Wahlberg’s James, but none of them get to make a solid impression or have much personality beyond vaguely profane, which – if they were aiming for that – never reaches the kind of transcendentally crass dialogue from something like David Ayer’s Sabotage. Sam Medina tries to bring some spark as the villain, but he doesn’t get enough to work with.
And then there’s the ending. I won’t give away what it is, but the last five minutes of this movie had me with my jaw to the floor. I couldn’t believe what I was watching. It’s meant to tie certain mysterious threads together, but it only ends up raising so many questions. It also muddles the film in a way that I can’t tell if it’s sloppily misguided or ballsy brilliance, since it’s the sort of ending that will more than likely leave the the more right leaning audience members in a seething rage, and everyone else in mild confusion. It throws so much important information in such a short period of time, while also taking drastically unexpected turns with some of the characters before cutting to credits, leaving you little time to fully process it. And get this – the whole sequence was kicked off by a gag involving Li telling James “say hi to your mother for me,” and no, I am not joking.
Mile 22 is a hell of a rollercoaster ride, but not in the way you might expect or even want. I found myself feeling various emotions throughout the whole thing that I didn’t see coming. I was annoyed, then I was angered, then I was bored, occasionally I’ll get excited by the few decipherable action beats, then I was back to being frustrated, and finally the ending hit me like an atomic bomb of WTF-ness. I don’t understand how such a simple premise, which really should be a walk in the park for anyone who can work a camera, can be morphed into such a bizarre, contorted, and perplexing mess like this, but somehow the filmmakers found a way. I honestly don’t know how to feel about this because I really didn’t like it for the most part, but I also love how uniquely disastrous it is, so make of that what you will.