Recently Mark Wahlberg startled us all by releasing details of his daily fitness routine. It involves getting up at 2:30am, a half-hour of golf, but three times that long in the shower. What on earth can he be doing for 90 minutes in the shower? The answer could well be ... very much what he’s doing over 94 minutes in this film, and it doesn’t involve pleasuring anyone else.
It is a chaotically undisciplined and aggressive action movie, coked up on its own machismo, with loads of stuff about what the special forces need to do to keep all the whiny ungrateful civilians safe. It’s another of Wahlberg’s collaborations with director Peter Berg, but without the style of their other films.
Wahlberg is on dismayingly charmless form playing James Silva, a super-tough guy with personal issues around aggression, leader of a special ops team that is directed from a control room by John Malkovich in a beige wig, who responds to each bloody setback with a display of lip-pursing, fastidious disapproval. Silva has a couple of women in his crew whose weakness he treats with as much gallantry and good humour as his own fearsome bad temper will allow.
The team’s mission? To find some purloined batches of nuclear material with which bad guys could make a Hiroshima-plus-plus-plus. The person who apparently knows their location is a mysterious Thai soldier Li Moor, demanding US asylum in return for his information. He is played by the Indonesian martial arts star Iko Uwais (from The Raid), and I have to admit that his close-quarter punch-up scene while handcuffed to a hospital gurney is very good – but utterly lost in Wahlberg’s unbearable vanity vehicle, which is deafening and deadening.
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