It’s
beyond heartbreaking when wealthy, middle-aged white men can’t find work as
action heroes, so cheers to French filmmaker Pierre Morel for singlehandedly doing
something to address their plight. After announcing his arrival with 2004’s
entertainingly dumb “District B13,” Morel went on to reinvent Liam Neeson’s
career (2008’s “Taken”), then — well, he kept John Travolta busy for a little
while (2010’s “From Paris With Love”). Two-time Oscar winner Sean Penn is the
latest AARP candidate to receive the Morel virility treatment, typically
consisting of genre clichés, women as pawns, questionable ethics, and decent
action smothered by too much expository chit-chat. And that, in a nutshell, is
“The Gunman,” another dull, overstuffed thriller about a repentant killer
murdering even more people in order to make things right-ish.
Penn stars as Jim Terrier, who we
first meet in 2006 as a security advisor for a mining company in the unstable
Democratic Republic of the Congo. By day the former Special Forces soldier
watches over the aid workers, by night he beds a beautiful doctor named Annie
(Italy’s Jasmine Trinca, “The Best of Youth”), and by later that night he freelances
as a hitman. It’s after pulling the trigger on one particularly high-profile
assassination that Terrier is forced “into the wind” and out of the country,
leaving Annie behind with no explanation. But there are enough furtive glances
and dirty looks in the hilariously unsubtle opening scenes to telegraph exactly
who’s behind Terrier’s banishment, and if you’ve ever seen a talkie before,
you’ll also figure out why.
Flash-forward eight years: Terrier
is back in the Congo, doing humanitarian work of his own, when an attempt on
his life sends him around the globe looking for answers from his one-time
comrades. Stage legend Mark Rylance plays Cox, Terrier’s former boss, now
working in a glass-and-steel high-rise doing — oh, I don’t remember; like it
matters. And Oscar winner Javier Bardem totally hams it up as Felix, Terrier’s
obvious frenemy who is now married to Annie, naturally. “I need to find out who
wants me dead before they find me again,” Terrier helpfully announces, and which
he proceeds to do, but embarking on a multinational killing spree in order to
save your own guilty ass really doesn’t give an audience much on which to hang
its collective hat.
One of the credited writers on the
screenplay is Penn himself, presumably lending some of his firsthand
social-activism knowledge to the 1981 noir source material by the late
Jean-Patrick Manchette, but anything he’s trying to impart to us just gets lost
in the unnecessarily complicated plot and its hackneyed dialogue. Despite its
lofty trappings, the film’s standard-issue conflict pretty much boils down to
who will ultimately get to keep having sex with Annie. Trinca frets and angers
very photogenically, yet the question of whether Annie truly matters beyond her
gossamer frocks is answered when one Kevlar vest becomes available to them both
and Terrier can’t strap himself into it fast enough.
Or perhaps that lack of chivalry was
just Terrier’s brain thingy acting up. The script goes to great lengths to
establish a medical impediment for Terrier, its only apparent purpose to
prolong scenes that aspire to be tense but just feel dragged out. Fortunately,
the location scenery is stunningly lush, shot in far-flung spots like Catalonia
and South Africa by Spanish cinematographer Flavio MartÃnez Labiano. No vista,
however, can distract from the crime of wasting the talents of a cast of this
caliber, one that also includes British treasures Ray Winstone and Idris Elba,
the latter not even speaking until nearly 90 minutes into the film.
And while it shouldn’t come as any
surprise that Penn does the best he can with what he’s given to build upon, the
54-year-old also acquits himself during the heavily edited action sequences,
his capable fighting moves rooted in Israeli self-defense techniques known as
Krav Maga. But “CGI body?” is something I wrote in my notes, because the man’s
lived-in face does nothing to prepare one for his impressive biceps and
gorgeously muscled torso, which Morel opts to showcase whenever possible.
(Another note: “Shower!”) Sadly, Penn’s marble physique might be the sole
highlight of “The Gunman,” armed with such firepower but merely shooting
blanks.
This article appears in Mar 25-31, 2015.
