Starring Mark Wahberg, Lauren Cohan, Iko Uwais, John Malkovich, Ronda Rousey, Sam Medina & Carlo Alban

Directed by Peter Berg

STX Films, out now

James Silva is the head of one section of Overwatch, a binary special operations unit tasked with deniable operations. Silva and his team are on the trail of six discs of weaponized caesium but come up short. Until Li Noor, Silva’s number two’s contact, walks into the American Embassy in a fictional southeast Asian country with an offer. Get him out of the country in eight hours and he’ll give them the codes to an encrypted hard drive carrying the locations of the caesium. All they have to do is get him 22 miles to the nearest airport…

A couple of weeks back I was all but certain The Predator was going to be the worst movie I saw this year. Apparently Mile 22 heard this and asked someone to hold its beer.

This is a scintilla away from being unwatchable. Not a single moving part works and the two moments that do pop do so despite the film not because of it.

The first one of those comes early on. Overwatch, operating on US soil, flush out a Russian safe house. They clear the building, identify everyone inside and then things go very suddenly and very realistically sideways. The ease with which they deal with this, not to mention the brutality, tells you more about the tone of the movie than a thousand shouted words from Marky Mark. Which is a shame as you get those too.

The second is literally the only time Wahlberg, who has never been more awful than he is here, shows up for work. In a confrontation with opposite number Axel, he reels off a list of things Axel has done and then, voice brittle and eyes wide leans in and says ‘I think I may? Be a LITTLE BIT WORSE’. It’s the single moment that Silva functions as a character, this pinwheeling, wild-eyed shouting machine who for a split second we see not as a liability but as a berserker with close combat training.

The rest of the movie? Actual honest to God hot garbage and I don’t use that term lightly. Berg has forgotten how to direct action and worse still, done so in the coming out party for the best action star on the planet. Iko Uwais is an innovative, graceful fight choreographer, an astonishing martial artist and a vastly impressive performer. Watch either instalment of The Raid franchise, probably through your fingers, and be amazed at just what he can do. Here? You’ll be lucky to glimpse him in the cavalcade of 1 second shots Berg scatterguns Uwais’ meticulously constructed fight scenes with.

Wahlberg is as bad. The man who has slowly carved out a niche for himself as a blue collar hero plays a sentient TV Trope here and does so dismally badly. Silva has hyperactivity disorder. Or is it bipolarity? Maybe he’s a schizophrenic? The film cares so little about portraying his condition as anything other than a hall pass for being an asshole that it actually has a group of characters joke about the exact nature of Silva’s damage late on. A leering, yelling, emotionally stunted manbaby with an assault rifle, this isn’t a character it’s a stick with an angry face and a post-it note marked ISSUES written on it. Wahlberg should be ashamed of himself. Berg too.

The rest of the cast basically drag the limp, bloodied corpse of this abject failure across the finish line in the exact way Silva doesn’t with his fallen team members. Ronda Rousey isn’t bad, aside from a clunky ‘Let’s laugh at the IT nerds’ moment which manages to be out of character even though she has very little character here. Carlo Alban is good as Silva’s back up and Lauren Cohan is better as Silva’s number two. Which, given she gets the trifecta of ‘bad choices’, ‘abusive ex husband in ego stroking cameo from director’ and ‘mommy issues’ is kind of amazing. Sam Medina is great too as Silva’s opposite number. None of them do anything but work hard. None of them save the movie because no one can.

But the real disappointments here are Lea Carpenter and Graham Roland, the scriptwriters. Roland has written for Fringe, Lost, Prison Break, Almost Human. He should be so much better than this. Carpenter’s first novel, Eleven Days, is an acclaimed exploration of the emotional damage of 9/11 in particular and war in general.

Here, at one point, they have Marky Mark tap a dying colleague on the shoulder, say ‘give ’em Hell’ and leave him to hold off another wave of generic brown evil people while the pretty, top billed cast members make a run for it.

Yeah.

Mile 22 does everything wrong and there’s no reason I can understand why it should. Berg has proved, time and again, to be a competent-to-good action director. Carpenter and Roland can write, usually very well. Cohan, Uwais, even Rousey should be assets a film can stand on not bury. And Wahlberg, Hollywood’s most consistent in performance and least consistent in quality leading man, can turn in good work.  And yet, here we are. A sexist, at least borderline racist, clodhopping waste of time and effort that tries to explore the subtle ambiguities and dark action of the counter-intelligence community but never succeeds long enough to honour the work of those who made it.

Verdict: A vast disappointment in every conceivable way. Avoid at all costs. 1/10

Alasdair Stuart