2 Guns Movie Review
Huh?
That’s pretty much what I was saying through most of this film. “Huh? The US military is involved in stealing money from drug cartels inside our borders?” “Huh? The CIA feels comfortable running around killing and torturing Americans inside the US (for the record the CIA’s remit is specifically operations outside of the US borders but a pertinent fact such as that would require like at least 30 seconds worth of research. Google doesn’t type questions in itself).” This wasn’t a movie about lots of little plot holes. This was a movie about a few massive, huge plot holes that made the entire film seem dumb and worthless.
I see this as symptomatic of the lowering of standards for movie writing. It’s like if you are building houses out of bricks and only use the highest quality materials, but once in a while a brick made out of dried cow dung sneaks in. At first you worry about lowering the quality of the house but you soon realize that you make the same amount of money off houses with a few crap brinks in it as you do with a complete brick home, and you figure out that dried cow dung bricks are both easier and cheaper to use so you start increasing the ratio of excrement to bricks leading us to the inevitable conclusion: a complete bulls@&$ house.
For those of you slow on the uptake or were sick on the day they did analogies in school the dung bricks are the plot holes in a movie. Never let it be said that I am not clear in my writing.
(Actually this is my pleasant, relatively naive theory. My darker theory is that Hollywood has done market research and somehow figured out the you, the mouth breathing audience, feels some kind of pleasant sense of self worth every time you spot a plot hole in a script and now they are stuffing them in on purpose in order to appeal to the general population. If this is true than we have no one to blame than yourself and I secretly hate you all for it.)
The other ugly trend I am noticing is how these days every modern film villain inevitably has to be a rogue American military or spy element. The reason for this is clear: if Hollywood is going to maximize its profits (the number one goal of every filmmaker in the world. Creative vision and artistic integrity? File those with petticoats in the list of things relevant today) they need to appeal to the foreign markets, and the only villain countries like China find acceptable is Americans. Of course, we can’t have America portrayed as the villain (you know, pre-emtively invade a country looking for non-existant WMD and then have the companies that supported the President make billions exploiting it) so the only choice is left is crazy or greedy Americans (or countries that don’t actually watch our films. Helloooo, North Korea!)
I have traveled around and enjoy meeting people from other countries, but as movie goers they are a plague of locusts so thick that they have clogged up all the breathing holes in Hollywood and cut of oxygen to the studios brains. Can’t you find some kind of local entertainment to occupy yourselves with and let us go back to making movies that don’t have to be 90% visual and specifically don’t suck? (yes, there are older movies that sucked but at least they never had a multi million dollar marketing campaign pushing them, unless you count Godzilla 1999).
Anyway, 2 Guns. I don’t think this movie is really going to be seen by a lot of people so SPOILER ALERT. Bobby Trench (Denzel Washington-Training Day, Flight, Man on Fire) and Michael “Stig” Stigman (Mark Wahlberg-Pain & Gain, Ted, Broken City) are two criminals casing out a bank robbery. There is a flashback to they dealing with a Mexican drug cartel and not getting the cocaine they wanted. Instead they opt to rob a bank that the cartel uses to store $2-3 million.
At that point we learn that both of them are agents of some kind or another. Trench is a DEA agent and Stig works for Navel Intelligence (??? The list of issues with this is staggeringly long. The Navy does not work on drug trafficking, does not have intelligence operations inside the US, does not rob banks, does not kill DEA agents, and pretty much does not let commanders run around doing whatever they feel like. During the course of the movie you do not see the ocean once. It all takes place in a desert, pretty much making it the one place the Navy has no reason to visit. In fact, this is where you would go to get away from the Navy). Trench is trying to bust the drug Cartel and Stig’s commander wants them to rob the bank in order to use the money to fund other operations (??? Jeez). Trench is helped by his DEA controller Deb (Paula Patton-Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Deja Vu, Precious) and Stig by his a-hole commander Quince (James Marsden-X-Men, Superman Returns, X-Men First Class).
They are going to go through with the robbery but Trench wants the DEA to bust them. The DEA doesn’t show up for mysterious reasons and the two get away with all the money. They double cross each other and Stig gets away after realizing Trench was DEA. Quince gets pissed off because Stig did not obey his order and kill Trench and tries to kill Stig.
At that point the best character in the film shows up in the form of CIA Agent Earl (the great Bill Paxton-Weird Science, Aliens, Titanic. Alien image courtesy of the Sci Fi T shirt collection). Turns out there was a lot more money in that back and it all belonged to the CIA as a slush fund they collect by delivering drugs for the cartels (???). His character was comically over the top but Bill played it so well that you can’t help but love him. He pretty much stole every scene. Anyway, he’s pissed about his money and starts torturing and killing people to get it back. The story gets a little convoluted at that point. Earl blackmails Trench into helping him recover the money. Stig want to clear his name. The local cartel kingpin gets involved, certain people are betrayed, and like all modern movies it all boils down to a multi-bad guy gun fight at the end where Stig shoots down a helicopter with a pistol.
The stars.
I thought Bill Paxton was awesome. One star. I am a Denzel Washington fan, and enjoyed Mark Wahlberg as well. One star. The action was decent once it got started. One star. Nice little nude scene in the first 1/3rd of the film. One star. The movie was cool with being rated R and never felt like they either ramped anything back or injected anything in just to cater to the MPAA. One star. Pacing was decent, and they at least made an attempt to have a fairly complicated plot. One star. Total: six stars.
The black holes.
The whole premise was a massive plot hole that sucked the rest of the film into it’s event horizon. One black hole. All the other plot holes did not help. One black hole. As much as I enjoy Denzel Washington I look forward to the movie where he does not just play his Training Day character. One black hole. The opportunity to make the plot twists extra cool was missed on several occasions as they did not even try to keep the secrets. One black hole. The film suffered from a lack of a tone. At first it was supposed to be a buddy comedy action film, then it turned into a dark crime film where people get executed, and in the last fifteen minutes turned into a different kind of buddy comedy action film. Two much gear shifting burns out the clutch in my brain. One black hole. Total: five black holes.
A grand total of one star, which puts this film firmly in the “Meh” category. The potential for greatness was present but missed like my high school guidance councilor telling me I should become a farmer. Worth seeing if you are bored and just want to be mindless entertained with the emphasis on “-less”. The plot seems complicated enough but if you try to suss it out you will just realize it’s all pretty dumb. Date movie? Another “meh”. Nothing here will lower her inhibitions but at the same nothing should increase them, unless she has a thing for smooth ruggedly handsome black guys in which case bail. Bathroom break? Nothing jumps out at me. Maybe the scene where the kingpin has the guys tied up with the bull. You’ll know it.
Thanks for reading. More coming soon, although I leave Tuesday for Las Vegas and will unfortunately be there at the Star Trek Show when Elsyium comes out. Talk about ironic. I have been waiting for that movie for a while (on a side note, if you work for the studio and can get me an advanced screening please contact me. I tend to be more kindly disposed towards films I don’t have to pay for and/or see in advance, I swear). Follow me on Twitter @Nerdkungfu. Comments on this review or the movie you can leave here. Off topic questions or suggestions can be emailed to [email protected]. Talk to you soon.
Dave
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