Sean Penn goes the action thriller route for his latest film “The Gunman” with the help of the director of “Taken.” Time Warner Cable News film critic Neil Rosen filed this review.
Sean Penn teams up with the director of the movie “Taken” in the new action thriller “The Gunman.”
Perhaps looking to go the Liam Neeson route and carve out a new career as an action star, Penn plays ex-assassin Jim Terrier.
We first see him in the Congo, in 2006, where he's been hired to kill the country's minister of mining. He successfully carries out his mission and then goes into hiding. Eight years later he's back in the Congo and now finds that he's the target of a hit squad.
Attempting to figure out who's out to kill him, Penn travels across Europe, with stops in both London and Barcelona, where he looks up some of his former team members. They include Ray Winstone, a loyal friend who tries to offer up some clues, Javier Bardem, whose wife Penn's character had an affair with years earlier and who he's still in love with and Mark Rylance, who might be someone who's not to be trusted.
The script, which was co-written by Penn, aims for something a little weightier than your average action film. However, the screenplay is uninvolving, often confusing and kind of a mess.
The characters are clichéd and the action sequences, directed by Pierre Morel are not all that exciting. However, the scenic European locales are pleasing to the eye.
Penn has also created an unlikable, overly intense protagonist who is hard to root for.
The supporting players, Bardem, Jasmine Trinca, who plays the love interest, Idris Elba, who shows up briefly and Rylance are all high caliber actors, but it doesn't matter what skills they bring to the table. They are all defeated by a movie that ultimately has little to say, offers up no thrills and, at a bit under two hours, seemed a lot longer.
Neil Rosen’s Big Apple Rating:
One and a Half Apples