movie review - Mile 22
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
It's Marky Mark vs Ip Man in a spy story that leans very heavily on violence in an un-named South-East Asian city (it was filmed in Bogota!). The Americans are there to extract a supposed corrupt cop with information he'll only share in exchange for extraction from Indonesia. The Indonesians don't want this to happen, as they claim their man is a traitor and will be a danger to the US as well. Getting this defector to the airport is the middle bit of this thing, and it sets off an incendiary sequence at a pace that the viewer can barely follow. The Americans try to fend off the Indonesians and eventually succeed in getting their man to the plane. Marky Mark then wanders the runway with a characteristic look of confusion on his face, and it all seems to be over. In under 90 minutes.
Now, why have I spelled out this plot. Because there's another plot behind all of this, and I'm frankly surprised that a modern US story pulled this off. Because despite all the bombast and Michael-Bay-friendly material here, this is truly a spy movie and we learn in the final two scenes that everything above is only what's on the surface. Because this is really a story of the US vs Russia, and it all hinges on a scene that starts the movie - where Marky Mark and his team take down a Russian den of spies. This isn't handled quite as well as it should have been, a bit more tell than show, and I think they could have done something with a few more minutes of run-time. It is, in short, not as dumb as it seems, but it's also not quite as clever as it thinks.
Recommended.