2 Guns 2 Many

Buoyed to the center of this vacant parcel of eternity called 2 Guns are two genuinely likable people: Mark Wahlberg and Denzel Washington, who are apparently out of money.

Did they buy fancy yachts recently? Cliffside homes in Monaco? Was there a bulk discount on some Monet paintings somewhere? I ask these questions because I grow concerned for their financial security. Both of these actors know what good scripts look and sound like. They know the rhythms, the nuance and all the other little quirks that turn mediocre movies into gems. Because they know these things — and because they found none in 2 Guns and still signed up to be in it — I must wonder if they took on this stupendously overcooked movie for the continuation of their craft or for a payday. If they're photographed with their boats or wakeboarding on their Monets anytime soon then I guess I have my answer.

Washington plays Bobby Trench, an undercover DEA agent, deep inside a Mexican drug cartel. Wahlberg plays Bobby's sidekick Stig, an undercover submarine captain … or was it an undercover sail rigger? I forget — just know he's a Naval officer working undercover in the Sonoran Desert, which is a laughable brand of irony. Even though law enforcement agencies have channels to verify and confirm other undercover agents, these two dopes have no clue they're playing for the same team. They finally get clued in when Stig sees Bobby's DEA badge after he shoots him and leaves him for dead in the desert, conduct very becoming of a member of our armed forces; and when Bobby identifies the make and model of Stig's sniper rifle pointed at him from 100 yards away and in the dark. "My, that dark splotch you're holding that I can barely see looks military. Are you an elite military operative, Stig?"

Each entraps the other to rob a bank of a couple million bucks. But then the bank is hiding a CIA slush fund worth $43 million, a bulky sum that turns everyone against everyone: the Navy against the DEA, the DEA against the CIA, the CIA against the Mexican cartel. (The NSA chuckles silently in the background of every phone call.) So convoluted are the alliances that at one point the Navy is fighting side-by-side with Stig and then in the very next scene they're villains. Apparently there are so many double-crosses that not even the movie itself can keep up. Making matters worse is the drug kingpin, whose name is Papi, which sounds so much like "Bobby" that I began to doubt the meaning of even the most basic dialogue. It made me wonder if anyone had actually read the script out loud before filming started. This give me hope for a movie I'm writing about a team of assassins all named after Roman numerals.

2 Guns is made from the bones of better movies, and from the skin and teeth of some deplorable stinkers. When it isn't lobbing us mindless action sequences and regurgitated gunplay bonanzas, it's filling the screen with cliché after ham-fisted cliché. The scenes of cops buying donuts and a detective guzzling Pepto Bismol right out of the bottle are particularly worn and tired. Even worse are Bobby and Stig's incessant griping at one another, even mid-shootout, because nothing is funnier than watching two men who will never get shot pretend they might get shot while they bicker about the plot's most microscopic aspects, like yogurt. (Full disclosure, I did enjoy Wahlberg's deadpan yogurt request in a soon-to-destroyed kitchen.)

Director Baltasar Kormákur must have studied the Michael Bay catalog of films to accomplish so little with so much. A lot happens in his movie, including multiple car chases, gunfights, fistfights and scenes of torture and interrogation. Frequently, these scenes end with violent executions for no other reason than to create a malevolent villain. The deeper Kormákur gets in his twisted tale, the more lost he finds himself. I'm still unsure of what side a female DEA agent was on, or if she was even on a side. Maybe she was an ordinary civilian undercover as a DEA agent for, you know, a research project or something.

Although Wahlberg and Washington do their best to rise out of all this muck, they can only do so much and then we must question their ability to pick movies with wanton abandon. I will say this: Wahlberg is much better here than he was in Pain & Gain, the worst film of 2013 so far. Washington is more perplexing. He just doesn't belong here and I'm not sure why he is here. He's certainly picked duds before, although this time he's noticeably working on autopilot. 

Who I question more of, though, is Bill Paxton as the CIA agent. He plays this honky-tonkin' Texan with a big ten-gallon hat and bolo tie. It's a cross between John Huston and Foghorn Leghorn. He's unnecessarily cruel and spiteful, which is unbecoming of Paxton's limited range. His Texan is also a bit of a fibber: in one scene he threatens to turn on the American military might, up to and including "Apache helicopters with Hellfire missiles" or something like that. But then later he shows up in a '70s-era Huey like it's Vietnam. You can almost hear the Creedence as the copter sweeps in low for machine-gun fire. I guess the movie ran out of money to make the Apache thing happen.

Paula Patton plays the other DEA agent, the one whose allegiances are still a mystery to me. I just finished watching an interview with Patton in which she says that she chose to do a nude scene in 2 Guns because it just "felt more natural after two characters — mine and Denzel's — had just made love." I commend her brave, nude quest for some cinematic realism, but did she not read the rest of the script? There's a shootout in a cattle stampede. Then the Texan with his Nam copter. A drug dealer buries chickens up to their wings and then uses their squawking heads for target practice. Later, a cartel kingpin, who urinates on his own hands for moisturizer, is called, and I quote, "a Mexican Albert Einstein." Paula Patton's threshold for realism is apparently so low that her next nude scene will be in a Skittles commercial.

I hate movies like 2 Guns; I also, incidentally, hate 2 Guns as well. I would like to say that Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg feel the same way and that no amount of money would get them to make a tired, old movie that better movies run circles around.

I would like to say that, but can't.

That line you just read was where my print edition of this review ended. Since then, I've spoken with several people who tell me they enjoyed 2 Guns because it was "action and shooting and explosions." I can't review movies for people who give a movie a passing grade if only because "things done get 'sploded." We should all hold our movies to a higher standard, even films within the action genre. That being said, if all that tickles your undercarriage is gunplay and explosions, and not so much plot and characters, then maybe 2 Guns is the movie you deserve.