Sean Penn shoots blanks in boring thriller.
Review by Brandon Wolfe
Liam Neeson probably didn’t realize it at the time, but when he made Taken in 2008 he basically created a new career pathway for dramatic actors of a certain age. Instead of being shunted off to supporting roles portraying the fathers of younger actors, Hollywood’s elder statesmen can now headline low-rent action films where they can pummel and throat-punch those younger actors and win the day. Neeson has made this route his full time job over the past several years, and we saw Pierce Brosnan jump into the fray in last year’s forgettable November Man. Now Sean Penn wants in on the action, and this is especially remarkable because Sean Penn has carved out a reputation for solely appearing in high-minded, prestigious fare. Neeson and Brosnan each had some action-flavored frivolity in their back catalogs, but Penn has turned up his nose at doing anything remotely fun ever since Spicoli.
Granted it’s not that big a leap because fun is just about the last thing The Gunman could ever be called. If Penn had to choose an action film, he managed to find one as dour and humorless as he is. This is an action-thriller Xeroxed from the blueprints of many others that came before it. If the film contained a single original idea, scene or line of dialogue, it slipped by me unnoticed. Hopelessly conventional action films are made all the time, but your guess is as good as mine for why Sean Penn, of all people, has made one.
Penn plays Jim Terrier, a hyper-skilled operative working for a shadowy corporation out to profit from the mineral industry in the Democratic Republic of Congo. When Terrier is assigned to assassinate a high-profile target, he is forced to flee the continent, leaving his loving girlfriend Annie (Jasmine Trinca) in the lurch and susceptible to the leering advances of Terrier’s creepy associate, Felix (Javier Bardem). Eight years later, while trying to cleanse his soul by working a well-digging project for an NGO (the sort of thing you imagine Penn himself does on the weekends), he is targeted by a group of mercenaries that he handily dispatches. He seeks out his former colleagues to find out why he is being pursued, which leads him to cross paths with Felix and Annie, who are now married. While Terrier attempts to sort out his enemies and reconnect with Annie, he also learns that he’s suffering from a brain malady that causes his memory to falter and leads to occasional blackouts.
The brain-damage aspect comes out of nowhere and threatens for a moment to make The Gunman something a bit different than the achingly familiar thriller pastiche it had been up to that point. Adding a dollop of Memento into this well-tread Bourne territory could only help matters, yet the movie has little use for this development except when it wants to generate some hacky dramatic tension via having Terrier start to fade out at the least opportune moments possible. The Gunman really isn’t interested in doing anything that goes off-book in any way. The movie trudges endlessly through its two-hour running time with no sense of joy or excitement to break through its turgid mass of clichés. The plot takes its sweet time to congeal into anything, and then once it does, it hits you how many times you’ve seen this exact story told this exact way. So lazy is the film that it helpfully broadcasts who its “secret” villain will turn out to be within its first five minutes. This is as autopilot as it gets.
It’s peculiar what might have drawn Penn to make this film (on which he shares a writing credit). He’s never had commercially driven instincts, so perhaps he simply wanted to play around in that arena for a change of pace, but you’d think an actor with such historically lofty aims would have sought out something of a much higher pedigree than this. Even Taken, as disreputably Eurotrashy as it was, had a propulsive story with strong dramatic underpinnings. The Gunman has nothing of the sort. It’s like a script Chuck Norris would have yawned at in 1987. The movie does have an underlying message of how craven Western corporations can wreak greed-driven havoc on impoverished nations, the exact sort of socially relevant moral that might get an activist like Penn’s motor running, but it really isn’t the movie’s true aim, and a lot of other equally disposable action films have contained sociopolitical elements that are paid the same amount of minimal lip service as this one does.
It should be said that Penn himself cuts a decent action figure. Unsurprisingly, he’s suitably intense, and handles himself adeptly in the physical sequences. He’s clearly logged in the appropriate amount of hours at the gym, something he’s obviously proud of, as he removes his shirt to show off his musculature whenever the opportunity arises. For a man in his early 50s, he exudes a surprisingly youthfulness, even if his meaty arms and odd facial structure call to mind Popeye the Sailor Man. But Penn is too glum and detached to make this character at all enjoyable. However, Penn’s very presence has attracted a supporting cast far too good for a movie this bland. Ray Winstone plays the stock role of Terrier’s trusted ally whose loyalty to his friend places him in harm’s way. Idris Elba shows up for a couple of brief scenes, mostly just to make loaded metaphorical speeches about treehouses. Most impressive is Bardem as Felix, who shows how to add some flair to a thinly-written character. Nothing about Felix is notable except for the oddball eccentricity with which Bardem brings to him. He’s the only actor in the film to rise above the material.
The Gunman was directed by Pierre Morel, who, perhaps uncoincidentally, also directed Taken. Morel is a competent director, if not a remarkable one. He certainly is more skilled than Olivier Megaton, Morel’s inept successor in the Taken franchise. The Gunman is shot adequately, but is otherwise flat virtually across the board. The film only perks up at all at its climax, set in the thick of a bullfight, and even that is only attributable to its unintentionally hilarious use of a bull as an implement of villain dispatching. Morel may have launched Liam Neeson into action stardom, but based on the strength of The Gunman, Sean Penn’s bid for his own Taken should have few takers.
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