How was your latest drive to the airport? Hopefully a lot less complicated and violent than the one Mark Wahlberg undertakes in his latest outing with frequent collaborator Peter Berg in “Mile 22.” Working from a wordy, wham-bam script by debut screenwriter and spy novelist Lea Carpenter, Berg and Wahlberg tackle the story of a special ops team tasked with transporting a high-value source from the depths of Indocarr City in Southeast Asia, onto a military plane bound for the United States, where he’ll claim asylum.
The Berg-Wahlberg canon, which includes “Lone Survivor,” “Deepwater Horizon” and “Patriot’s Day,” is concerned with heroism, particularly of the “based on a true story” kind. This is their first film together that’s not based on a real-life tale of ordinary men doing extraordinary things, and it feels like they’ve been raring to cut loose. Rather than meticulous, documentary-style re-creations of true events, the pair are let off the leash to run roughshod over Carpenter’s densely packed script.
The Berg-Wahlberg films are stories about systems — systems that work and systems that fail, that tango between protocol and improvisation. There’s a systemic approach to the filmmaking, too, with constant format-swapping from handheld to surveillance video to drone footage. That’s all glued together with a star persona the audience can hang onto, and Berg just lets Wahlberg do Wahlberg. “Mile 22” even features an inexplicable intertextual joke that has everything to do with Marky Mark and nothing to do with his character, Jimmy Silva.
Freed from the respectful restraints of non-fiction, Berg goes completely hog-wild, cinematically, and it doesn’t exactly work. The film is a riot of nearly incomprehensible editing, a violent melee of intertwining scenes, shots, characters, formats and timelines, straining the limits of coherence and cogency. Just keep telling yourself: They’re going to the airport.
