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Mike Wilmington

By Mike Wilmington Wilmington@moviecitynews.com

Wilmington on Movies: 2 Guns

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

2-guns__03Fast 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 MarsdenFred WardPatrick FischlerAzure ParsonsRobert 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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Wilmington

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon