Overall, I definitely enjoyed this ruthless and humorously vulgar actioner, but the final moments left me scratching my head – they had no ending and I don’t like it when movies can’t tell a complete story, especially when there’s absolutely no guarantee that there will be a sequel.
There’s also some extremely weird dialogue spoken all throughout that had me wondering if everyone knew just exactly what was being spoken. But outside of these surprising oddities, it’s clear that director Peter Berg (Lone Survivor, Patriots Day, Deepwater Horizon, The Kingdom) wanted to simply stage a series of extremely violent action set-pieces with essentially zero CGI-flavoring.
The story is simple: a group of tactical operatives have to escort a prisoner from an Embassy to a military transport plane and an entire city of baddies is going to stop them. Characterization is revealed through action, and it’s all rather unrelenting in its pace and sense of escalating forward momentum.
I loved all of the wanton destruction that this movie provided, and from a narrative stand-point, at 94 minutes, this film moves like a fuckin’ laser-beam, never pausing for a moment, and upping the frenetic aesthetic to a nearly dizzying degree; the cinematography and editing in this film would have made Tony Scott blush.
Iko Uwais is the baddest of bad-asses, and you get your money’s worth when he’s on-screen; clearly inspired by The Raid, Berg and his team definitely delivered on the drag-your-neck-across-broken-glass action that the trailers promised.
Also, Lauren Cohan is VERY hot, and I loved that none of the “good-guys” (well, with an exception of one) were truly safe during the story – a surprising amount of people get messed up in this hostile, down and dirty time-waster.
Review by Nick Clement
- Mile 22
Summary
This film moves like a fuckin’ laser-beam, never pausing for a moment, and upping the frenetic aesthetic to a nearly dizzying degree but it’s such good fun!
