Seriously,
why bother assassinating a government official of a failed state? A small team
of mercs will do so anyway, because a job is a job. Unfortunately, the shadowy
outfit managing the contract has started tying up loose ends. Those would be
Jim Terrier and his former comrades-in-arms. He just might be the only left who
isn’t part of the conspiracy, but he should be enough to bring them all down in
Pierre Morel’s The Gunman (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
For
a while, Terrier was really enjoying the Congo assignment. While secretly
working for Lawrence Cox’s death squad, he volunteered as a relief coordinator
by day to maintain his cover. That is how he met and fell hard for Annie, the
professional do-gooder. Unfortunately, just when both their romance and the
country’s civil war are heating up, Terrier is assigned to the team taking out
an uncooperative natural resources minister looking to renegotiate terms (in
real life, the mining companies would just say fine, call us when you have a
working legal system). Since he will be the trigger man, Terrier will have to vanish
afterwards, leaving Annie to the creepy advances of Felix, his smarmy corporate
contact.
Haunted
by his collective guilt, Terrier returns to Congo, hoping to do penance, like
Jack Bauer in the two-hour special 24:
Redemption. However, when an unusually well-equipped hit squad shows up gunning
for Terrier, he realizes someone is out to get the old gang, but they all seem
to be dead, except for him and the suspiciously chipper Cox. Felix also seems
to be acting excessively obnoxious, but that is just sort of how he is. For
understandable reasons, his wife Annie has mixed emotions seeing Terrier again,
but the sparks are still there. She tries to guilt trip him, pointedly asking: “what
did you expect showing up after all this time,” but since they just slept
together, things are probably exceeding his expectations (but not necessarily
ours).
Frankly,
the early scenes of the hard-bitten assassins doubling as relief logistical
specialists are rather intriguing and hint at dramatic possibilities the film
opts not to take. Of course, we have to deal with the film as it is and not
what it might have been. Granted, the narrative drive and internal logic start
to sag in the second act, with the former rebounding and the latter utterly imploding
down the stretch, but nobody can blame Sean Penn. Gunman is really his coming out party as a middle aged action
figure, where he indeed shows he has the chops and the presence. He also
clearly put in the time at the gym.
However,
Idris Elba is even more impressive, getting second billing over Javier Bardem
for maybe two days of work, tops. Appearing as DuPont, the Interpol agent, he
just drops in, makes an extended treehouse analogy and then disappears until it’s
time for the mopping up. Yet, he is still totally badass. Ray Winstone does his
old hardnosed thing as Terrier’s trustworthy associate Stanley and Mark Rylance’s
Cox chews on a fair amount of scenery. Frankly, it is hard to know what to make
of former Bond villain Bardem, but at least he isn’t playing it safe as the
whiny, petulant Felix. On the other hand, it is safe to say Jasmine Trinca (so
subtle and earthy in Valeria Golino’s Honey)
is woefully wasted as the problematically passive Annie.