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‘2 Guns’ is a surprisingly entertaining action throwback

‘2 Guns’ is a surprisingly entertaining action throwback

2Guns_poster

2 Guns
USA, 2013
Written by Blake Masters
Directed by Baltasar Kormakur

In today’s trailer-analyzing, spoiler-focused culture, it’s a wonderful thing simply to be surprised by a film. The trailer for 2 Guns promised a bland, straightforward action movie starring Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg: wisecracks, gunfire, car chase, kidnapped girlfriend sets up an explosive climax. The actual film has all of those things in it, but they are connected in complex and unusual ways that remove all of the blandness and make the film much more enjoyable than might be expected.

At the start of the film, Washington and Wahlberg put a plan in motion to rob a bank. A brief flashback shows why they decided to commit the crime: they’re criminal hustlers who had a drug deal go wrong. Except they’re actually undercover agents, each unaware of the other, who are going to use the bank robbery to bring down the drug dealer in question (Edward James Olmos). That’s not really a spoiler, since it all happens in the first half-hour of the movie, but it would involve heavy spoilers to describe how the double-crosses fly after the robbery is completed, including betrayals that are not even hinted at in the trailer.

One’s appreciation for 2 Guns will probably be tied to how one feels when the always-dependable Bill Paxton makes his appearance as an agent in search of the stolen money. Paxton’s chilling, twisted character establishes the film as a throwback to the buddy-cop movies of the 1980s, films which lived in the shadow of Lethal Weapon and other Shane Black screenplays. Like those films, 2 Guns is rated R, which allows for full violent value from both Paxton and from the slightly anti-heroic heroes.

The R-rated action-comedy is something of a lost art; even on the rare occasions when a studio tries to make one these days, it’s unable to find the right mix of funny and intense. A film like this has to be jokey at the right times and serious at the right times, else the humor feels all wrong and the violence gets too excessive. The screenplay by Blake Masters mostly works, although some jokes are a bit over-written (the scene in which our heroes steal a car seems to go on forever for relatively small payoff). There are jabs at political relevance, as there were in ‘80s films like Air America, but never so much that this feels like anything more than slight summer-movie fluff.

Washington is an infinitely watchable actor one simple reason: he makes it look so easy. No one is going to confuse this role with Malcolm X or Hurricane Carter, but he never sleepwalks through it and he never strains to hit the right note. Here, his character is not the action badass who knows his wild plans are always going to come together, but he would like to be, and is trying to be with increasing desperation as the film’s plot grows more complicated. By contrast, Wahlberg is just playing the same sort of “cheerful and dumb, but not as dumb as you think” guy that he plays in many films. The positive aspect of that is, most of the films in which Wahlberg plays that character are his best efforts, because this has always been the thing he’s best at.

If nothing else, this movie should rehabilitate director Baltasar Kormakur, who last made the awful 2011 film Contraband. That film felt like a weak-tea PG-13 lark, despite the fact that it had a hero played by Wahlberg who (to paraphrase Swingers) was the guy in the R-rated movie we’re unsure whether or not to like. With 2 Guns Kormakur does a fine job of constructing an efficient R-rated action movie around two such heroes, convincing the audience to like them even as they move further and further outside the law, and making the explosive climax that everyone knew was coming still feel like a surprise.

-Mark Young

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