STX Entertainment
- Director Peter Berg and actor Mark Wahlberg's fourth movie together, "Mile 22," is being slammed by critics for its messy, incoherent plot.
- With a 24% Rotten Tomatoes critic score, the movie is one of the worst reviewed of Berg and Wahlberg's careers, and of this summer.
- Critics have compared the movie to far-right conspiracy website InfoWars and being drunkenly yelled at.
- Berg and Wahlberg were hoping to launch a franchise with the movie.
The new action movie "Mile 22" marks director Peter Berg's fourth movie with actor Mark Wahlberg - and, according to critics, it's easily the duo's worst.
The two paired up on the well-reviewed true tales "Lone Survivor," "Deepwater Horizon," and "Patriots Day," each of which dramatized real-life tragedy. But as Indiewire's David Ehrlich put it in his review of "Mile 22," their latest movie is "almost bad enough to make you wish Berg hadn't run out of terrible events that could be turned into popcorn entertainment."
The movie's official description is, "Aided by a top-secret tactical command team, [CIA operative James] Silva [Wahlberg] must retrieve and transport an asset who holds life-threatening information to Mile 22 for extraction before the enemy closes in."
But if you ask most critics, the plot is an incoherent mess that takes advantage of America's current political climate with bad results. The movie has a 24% Rotten Tomatoes critic score as of Friday morning - one of the worst-reviewed movies of the summer, and of Wahlberg and Berg's careers.
Rolling Stone's David Fear said that "Mile 22" feels like "'Info Wars: The Movie,' a motormouthed mess that finds Wahlberg indulging in endless paranoid jags in between needlessly complicated plot loop-the-loops."
The Wrap's Robert Abele said "the movie equivalent of being shouted at by your drunk ex-Army dad about how stupid and pointless your taste in popcorn fare is, and why can't there be more bloody combat scenes with foreigners?"
Berg and Wahlberg weren't initially going to sign on to the movie. But then they got franchise hopes. Berg told Entertainment Weekly, "It kind of checked that box of not being another true story. [Wahlberg] had a slot open and there's no one I want to work with more. I was kind of hooked on the story, which I was involved in creating."
"We both liked having this action franchise in theory ... and not having to tell a true story," he added.
Those prospects didn't seem to benefit the movie, though. For The AV Club, A.A. Dowd wrote, "There's also no third act to speak of, to the point where it's unclear whether that's purely a product of shameless franchise aspirations (an implicit "to be continued" has scarcely ever seemed so presumptuous) or some hasty editing-room reconfiguration."
The movie might have to pull in big money at the box office to offset the terrible reviews if it wants to launch a franchise, though.