Starring: Sean Penn, Jasmine Trinca, Javier Bardem, Ray Winstone, and Mark Rylance.
Distributor: StudioCanal
Runtime: 115 mins. Reviewed in Apr 2015
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This American action thriller made by the French Director of “Taken” (2008), Pierre Morel, tells the story of a former Special Forces soldier, whose past as a hit-man comes home to haunt him. The film is based loosely on the novel, “The Prone Gunman”, written by Jean-Patrick Manchette in 1981.
The story tells us that Jim Terrier (Sean Penn) was a member of a mercenary assassination team, which targeted the Minister of Mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo in 2006. Terrier’s superior at the time, Cox (Mark Rylance), organised the hit. The kill was successful and Terrier, who made the kill-shot, was forced to go into hiding to protect the team from retribution. The assassination was financed by a foreign mining company which stood to make profit from the Minister’s death, and massive chaos resulted from his murder.
Eight years later, and suffering doubts about what he did, Terrier returns to the Congo as a peace worker, hoping that his humanitarian efforts will make up for his personal guilt about what he has done. Back in Africa, he unexpectedly finds himself the target of a hit squad, and again to protect those working around him he goes into hiding and re-establishes connections with members of the old assassination team. The movie is filled with espionage, personal turmoil, and political and corporate intrigue. To make things worse, Interpol is on the hunt, and Terrier is battling a serious brain condition, and only a few friends (Ray Winstone) are around to help him through.
Terrier’s one-time friend, Felix (Javier Bardem) selected him for the original hit, but Felix’s motives for doing so were suspect. When the hit occurred, Felix was romantically interested in Annie (Jasmine Trinca), who was involved with Terrier at the time. Felix arranged for Terrier to leave the country, but Annie was never told by Felix, or anyone else, why Terrier left her behind.
The movie’s plot-line indicates predictably that someone from the original assassination team was linked by corruption to the machinations of the multinational conglomerate, which was behind the Minister’s murder. Terrier goes in search of who is responsible for trying to eliminate him as “the last threat”, and he reconnects with Annie who is now Felix’s wife. Terrier realises that Annie’s life is in danger and he decides to do everything he can to protect her.
This movie continues the current trend of using mature, well-buffed male actors and turning them into ageing action heroes. Most recently, that was done with some success in “Run All Night” (2015), starring Liam Neeson. This movie is the more violent one. It has lots of blood-spills, shows sexual as well as personal betrayal in human relationships, is very violent, and makes heavy use of confronting language. Bloody action, rather than moral behaviour, is its main concern.
A number of the movie’s action sequences are technically impressive, though a little fanciful, but the final scenes of the movie, in particular, throw all plausibility to the wind. Fast and furious action is always the name of the game. The film is a calculated show-case for an ageing action hero, and character consistency or serious personality reform is not its major concern.
Penn faces all the issues in the movie almost single-handedly with a characteristic look of world-weariness, and the film doesn’t seriously develop the theme of atonement. Digging wells and caring about the cleanliness of the water for destitute people never really come across as convincing substitutes for what happened in the past. The action of the movie is too important. Heads explode, faces and throats get slashed, and guns blast away with predictable results. The camera roams through Africa, England, Spain and Gibraltar, and ends up thoroughly implausibly in a bull fighting ring in Spain, and it is violence that mostly provides the link.
This is a disappointing movie for the fans of Sean Penn, who has made some excellent movies in the past, such as “Milk” (2008), which won an Academy Award for him as Best Actor in a leading role that year. And Pierre Morel brought much more style to the cinema screen in “Taken” than he does here. As an energetic, fast-paced action thriller, this film entertains only sporadically. It works hard to fill the requirements of the thriller genre, but more often than not it misses its mark.
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