Silva is the leader of an elite band of CIA paramilitary operatives who don’t officially exist. Some 30 years later, Silva is still regularly snapping the rubber band - which leads us to believe maybe that little technique didn’t quite do the trick. When Silva was a kid, a therapist gave him a rubber band and told him to snap his wrist every time his mind started moving too quickly and he could feel his temper heating up. In two films, teen girls suffer after parents send them away for repairs Upbeat and upscale, ‘Crazy Rich Asians’ delivers 24-karat entertainment If that’s not baggage enough, as a young boy he was the lone survivor of a terrible accident that wiped out the rest of his family. Wahlberg’s Silva, we’re told, was a hyperactive, super-intelligent, overly aggressive kid, prone to outbursts. This film plays like a live-action video game crossed with an overwritten screenplay in which characters occasionally take a break from the action to rattle off super-speedy, tongue-twisting dialogue that was probably a lot more fun for the actors to deliver than it is for us to withstand. Now comes the purely fictional CIA thriller “Mile 22,” and though it crackles with energy and has some impressive albeit gratuitously bloody kill sequences, the Big Picture plot is a dud, up to and including the preposterous final scenes.Īs the body count piles up and various characters get shot, stabbed, kicked, punched, bludgeoned and otherwise reduced to a pulp, our emotional investment in the (relatively) good guys remains at a minimum, because we know so little about them. “Lone Survivor” (2013), “Deepwater Horizon” (2016) and “Patriots Day” (2016) were all inspired by true stories, and though one might have occasionally winced at the notion of real-life tragedies being turned into vehicles for Mark Wahlberg action movies, all three films were solid efforts, made with respect for the actual heroes.
“Mile 22” is the fourth collaboration in recent years between director Peter Berg, who really knows how to shoot kinetic, fast-paced action scenes as well as rapid-cut hand-to-hand combat sequences, and Wahlberg, who of course really knows how to carry such movies. It’s almost as if our anti-hero has absorbed such a pounding, taken such a pummeling, been knocked around so much, he’s virtually numb to whatever happens next. Deep into the gruesome, action-packed, explosion-filled and convoluted mess that is “Mile 22,” somebody throws a quiet verbal jab in the direction of Mark Wahlberg’s black ops specialist, James Silva.