At one point in “The Gunman,” the new Sean Penn geopolitical thriller, our star goes surfing. It’s supposed to show he has a reckless side, since he’s surfing in unsafe territory, but it seems to have a larger, much more obvious purpose: To show us that Penn, at 54, is ripped. Very, very ripped.
It’s no accident that the trailer for “The Gunman” notes prominently that it comes from the director of “Taken” (Pierre Morel), the 2008 thriller that transformed Liam Neeson into a no-nonsense, border-hopping, middle-aged action star. Despite the high-minded issues ostensibly at play here — Western commercial exploitation of Africa, guilt and penance, love and abandonment — we soon realize the goal is pretty much the same as in “Taken”: to have us watch Penn’s muscles ripple as he kicks butt in a variety of picturesque locales.
We begin in 2006 in the Congo, where mercenary Jim Terrier (Penn), an ex-special forces man working ostensibly in security, is up to something dodgy with his band of European former military types, who include Felix (Javier Bardem, extra smarmy here) and Cox (the great stage actor Mark Rylance, whose own brand of smarm is less crazed, more chilling). One morning Jim says goodbye to girlfriend Annie (lovely Italian actress Jasmine Trinca, given little to do but act alternately loving, hurt and scared). She thinks he’ll be picking her up later at the health clinic where she works. He says he hopes he won’t be working late. We know from Penn’s face that it might be a long while indeed before he returns.
That same night, as it happens, Jim’s task is to assassinate the country’s mining minister on behalf of his shadowy foreign bosses. His mission accomplished, Jim needs to leave, and fast. We don’t see him again for eight years; After some time in Europe, he’s back in Africa, trying to purge his sins with humanitarian work digging wells. But someone’s out to kill him. After a sudden attack at his worksite sees him dispatching a bunch of machine-gun-toting killers, Jim flees once more, in a desperate fight to find his killers before they find him.