2 Guns

In 2 Guns, we get a wonderful star team up of Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington, only to place the charismatic duo in the middle of a routine and standard issue action comedy.  The action set pieces are well done, and the stars play off each other well.  They simply cannot overcome the fact that the screenplay feels like it was assembled, rather than written, having been constructed with workman-like precision from the pieces of other movies just like it.

The central gimmick is that Wahlberg and Washington are playing secret agents infiltrating a drug kingpin, who are completely unaware of each other's identity.  Bobby (Washington) works for the DEA, while Stig (Wahlberg) is a Naval Intelligence Officer.  As the film opens, both are posing as bad guys working for the same kingpin (played by Edward James Olmos).  They get paired up together, and eventually become friends, each of them thinking the other guy really does work for the man they're secretly trying to bring down.  Early on, the two guys rob a bank, hoping to steal $3 million dollars from the kingpin.  What they end up with is $41 million.  With the money in hand, both Bobby and Stig decide it's time to drop the charade, and turn the money over to their respective bosses.  Both are shocked to find out they're working for different agencies investigating the same guy, and Stig winds up shooting Bobby, and taking off with the money.

Here is where the movie makes its first big mistake.  It's spent the first half hour building up the friendship of its two stars, and getting us to enjoy seeing them together.  They have a very easy chemistry, and trade funny one-liners with ease.  Once their true purposes are revealed and the two turn against each other, the movie pretty much forces them to stay apart from each other.  Okay, I get it, they're not supposed to like each other.  But the screenplay still could have thought of some way to bring them together for an extended period of time.  Instead, they spend most of the movie catching up with each other, then running away.  Even when they are forced to work together (such as when they infiltrate the Naval base that Stig works for), they still separate from each other, so we don't get what we've paid to see - two fine actors working together.  Buddy comedies usually work better when the two stars are required to spend most of the movie together, which is probably why this one doesn't work very well.

It's not just Bobby and Stig who are leading secret lives in 2 Guns, though.  Seems like everybody who walks into this movie has some kind of hidden motive.  The movie throws so many double and triple crosses, the audience starts to lose count after a while.  I understand what the movie is trying to do here.  It's showing that no one, not even high ranking government officials, are immune from taking a little money out of the drug trade now and then.  But, there's nothing clever about how the movie presents this idea.  It's a very straight-forward "everybody's out to get everybody else" plot.  When the first double cross happens, maybe we're a little bit surprised.   At the second one, some in the audience might still be amused.  The third time it happens, we not only expect it, we've probably started taking bets on who's going to turn on whom next.  It's okay for a movie to throw a curve to its audience.  But when it starts doing it over and over again, it starts to look desperate.

Through it all, Wahlberg and Washington remain professional, and are easily the best part of the entire movie.  I would like to see them team up again, only in a script that truly plays up to their charisma, instead of going out of its way to keep them separated as much as possible.  Everybody else who wanders into the movie pales in comparison.  Unfortunately, this includes some talented actors, including Bill Paxton as a violent CIA operative, and James Marsden as a crooked Naval officer.  Nobody gets to make as strong of an impression, except for Paula Patton, as a woman whom Washington's Bobby has close ties to.  She gets to show an easy chemistry with him in their early scenes together, only to have the plot get in the way, and have things not appear to be what they seem.  By that point, I wanted the script to stop trying to be so clever, and just focus on these people.

2 Guns is far from a bad movie, but its disappointing just the same, because of the squandered opportunities when it comes to its two stars.  They're absolutely great with what they've been given, and it only makes me wonder what they could have done with a script that truly embraced their partnership.  My advice to filmmakers is to put Wahlberg and Washington together in another movie, and this time, just let us enjoy their company, instead of trying to trick us and throw us off the track constantly.

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