Jean-Paul’s rating: 4/5 stars
Q: What do you get when you cross Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg?
A: An incredibly fun action movie with some hilarious interactions between the two stars.
A word of warning, this movie is not to be taken seriously. Any attempts to take this movie seriously will be used against you in a court of law. That said, wow is this movie fun. Stig (Mark Wahlberg) and Bobby (Denzel Washington) play two drug dealers/problem solvers who are working for a Mexican drug kingpin, Papi Greco (played by the always awesome Edward James Olmos). Only, Bobby is actually a DEA agent trying to take down Papi. Oh, and Stig is actually a Navy Seal who is trying to, well, that’s not entirely clear. I mean, they have an explanation but it doesn’t really make much sense and has to do with robbing a bank that contains Papi’s drug money stash.
So they’re off to rob a bank. Things don’t go quite as expected. This leads to a series of events that can only be described as improbable. S’ok, though, this is an action movie. The action sequences are pretty standard, but entertaining. Where the movie shines, though, is all the interactions between Bobby and Stig. It’s like Abbott and Costello with those two. Bobby’s the straight man and Stig’s the goof. The only real problem with the movie is that there are a sequence of events when Bobby and Stig are separated and then it just becomes a standard action movie. Get them back together and the fun starts once again.
A funny story. Prior to the movie, my brother and I were discussing Mark Wahlberg and he had commented on how he could never take Mark Wahlberg seriously as an actor. He has a bit of a prejudice against crossover stars who start as musicians and move over into acting (except for Ice Cube who he thinks is awesome). I was defending Mark Wahlberg as a pretty competent actor who can do some serious work. Then this movie comes along and validates everything my brother thought about Mark. This is not to take anything away from Walhberg. He plays off Denzel Washington incredibly well in this movie. He can not by any stretch of the imagination be called a serious actor, though.
After watching this movie, I want to see a “2 Guns” comedy series featuring Wahlberg and Washington. They were that much fun together. What “2 Guns” provides is an outlandish plot strewn together with some decent action scenes and packaged with some teriffic buddy antics. It’s not art, but it is high quality entertainment.