2 Guns - film review and trailer

As Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg engage in Tarantino-lite banter over pancakes and flirting tactics, it’s clear that star chemistry is doing its incalculable work
Guy Lodge16 August 2013

As the closing credits rolled on this expensively cheap and cheerfully violent action comedy from Icelandic export Baltasar Kormàkur, I was somewhat surprised to read that it was based on a series of graphic novels. I shouldn’t have been, of course. Even high-minded Palme d’Or winners come from comic books these days, and this triangular chase between undercover agents, crooked soldiers and moustachioed Mexican drug lords is certainly cartoonish enough to imagine in drawn form. Still, its salty margarita-flavoured charms are redolent of a different kind of pulp fiction: screenwriter Blake Masters’ knockabout antics and crackling dialogue seem pulled from the pages of a poolside paperback by Robert Crais or Elmore Leonard.

What it’s about is less important than who it stars. As Trench and Stigman, a narcotics cop and naval intelligence officer reluctantly allied to bring down a cocaine kingpin, Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg don’t outwardly seem like a fun pairing. You’d think their combined all-American machismo — one slick, the other more rough and ready, but equally brawny — might be surplus to the needs of even the sweatiest Hollywood thriller. But from their first scene together, as they engage in Tarantino-lite banter over pancakes and flirting tactics, it’s clear that star chemistry is doing its incalculable work. Wahlberg gives Washington levity; Washington gives Wahlberg resolve.

 

As a team, they bring necessary air to proceedings too convoluted to explain in this space. Initially unaware of each other’s undercover vocations, Trench and Stigman begin the film by pulling off a $43 million heist. It’s intended to snare Greco, but only winds up drawing other jackals into the hunt — chief among them a bent, Russian-roulette-loving CIA man played by the excellent Bill Paxton, whose dashing Panama hat must be the nattiest film noir accessory since Ryan Gosling’s driving gloves.

Seemingly taking notes from the late Tony Scott, Kormàkur lets things get louder and sillier from there, though never bloodier than a hilarious early scene that finds four chickens losing their heads in mordantly literal fashion. No film called 2 Guns is making any false promises of good taste or sophistication; thankfully, this sharp-tongued shoot-’em-up is only playing dumb.

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