2 GUNS (Three Stars)
U.S.: Baltasar Kormákur, 2013

Fast and slick, violent and sarcastic, predictable but entertaining, 2 Guns is a smarter-than-usual big-budget crime thriller in a season that hasn‘t seen that many really good ones. I was pretty well entertained by it all the way through, but it melted away fairly soon after I left the theatre—which was more a problem with the writing than with the direction or acting.

The source is a graphic novel by Steven Grant, adapted with some verve by TV writer Blake Masters (Brotherhood, Law and Order L.A.), and the show has two of the best smart-ass leading men around, Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg—bouncing zingers off each other as undercover agents pretending to be crooks (Washington is seasoned and sardonic D.E.A. guy Bobby Trench and Wahlberg is his junior partner, wisenheimer Stig Stigman of U.S. Naval Intelligence), and then bouncing more zingers off a supporting gallery that includes the perversely vicious drug czar Papi Greco (Edward James Olmos, who manages to look like death warmed over), Bobbi’s stunner D. E. A. ex-girlfriend Deb (Paula Patton, who looks like 40 million) and a tangy array of crooks, lawmen and not-so innocent bystanders (James Marsden, Fred Ward, Patrick Fischler, Azure Parsons, Robert John Burke and the incredible Bill Paxton) all under the snappy direction of a gifted filmmaker, Baltasar Kormákur whom I would call the Icelandic Don Siegel, except it doesn’t do him justice.

2 Guns is well directed, well acted, well shot (by Oliver Wood), well scored (by Clinton Shorter), well edited (by Michael Tronick), and never boring (though occasionally annoying). The script is better than average. Unfortunately, most of the big action movie screenplays these days are so lousy or uninspired, calling them “better than average” is a dubious accolade. The dialogue is glib and crisp and cheerfully dirty—especially when the two stars are delivering it.—but it’s also at the service of one of those stories that begins to crumble and fall apart when you start thinking about it. That’s okay if you‘re up for the ride. You can turn off your brain for most of the show, and have a fairly good time—even if, when you walk out afterwards, the story has gone up in flames like one of Stig’s offhand burn-down-the-house-or-the café fire-flips.

Washington and Wahlberg start off like a typical rag-each-other bromance cop couple, with the glib Bobby expressing quiet exasperation and the cheerfully annoying Stig given to flirting with waitresses, lascivious winks and flipping lit matches. And pretty soon they have both sides of the law chasing them and they get to indulge their specialties, or what we often want to see from them—while playing these undercover agents, who are unaware of each other’s true identities and jobs (though they’ve been working together for a year or so) and who‘ve been assigned to rob a bank in Tres Cruces, New Mexico—a bank that has a lot more money in its vault (a cool 40 million) than either of them imagines.

SPOILER ALERT, SORT OF (roll over)

Actually, they’re being set up by somebody and they’re expected to self-destruct—a fate that seems more perilous when we learn that the stolen dough is partly the property of the C. I. A., represented here by the extremely malign but oddly affable agent Earl (played by Paxton—usually typed as a nice guy, but here sensational as a bad one)—who shows up to track down the loot and starts launching into sadistic interrogation sessions with some added Russian Roulette.

END OF ALERT

If this all seems highly unlikely and complex and a little batty, that’s the way it plays. But in a sort of good way. The fact that Washington and Wahlberg and Paxton and the others, keep it entertaining and somewhat plausible in a movie-movie kind of way is a tribute to the movie actor’s art, or maybe to the power of movie stardom. As an acting team, or star combo, Washington and Wahlberg have chemistry to spare, even though they’re both playing wise guys.

Really hip movie people will recognize the bank-with-too-much-money plot twist, as well as the fictional city of Tres Cruces, New Mexico, as both grabs from (or homages to) one of the great, but lesser-known movie crime thrillers of the 1970s: Charley Varrick, with Walter Matthau as a free-lance bank robber and “last of the independents“ Varrick and Joe Don Baker as the businesslike hit man chasing him: a movie directed by our man Don Siegel—and a show I like much more than this movie‘s other oft-cited influence, Lethal Weapon. It didn’t bother me at all that Masters and Kormákur borrowed from (or paid tribute to) Charley Varrick. In fact, I wish they’d stolen or paid homage more. 2 Guns tends to be at its best when it’s at its most unoriginal.

Northern whiz Kormákur has been prolific throughout the 2000s, splitting his time between theater and movies (that would make him the Icelandic Ingmar Bergman) and also hopping between Icelandic art films (101 Reykjavik and The Deep) and Hollywood popular genre thrillers (Contraband, also with Wahlberg). I‘ve missed most of them, though, on the strength of the direction here, which is often terrific, I should do some catching up. But what about a remake of Charley Varrick ? Trouble is: Nobody could match Matthau and Baker. Not even Washington and Wahlberg. Or Edward James Olmos and Bill Paxton.

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