The Gunman
Grade: D
Director: Pierre Morel (Taken)
Screenplay: Don MacPherson (The Avengers), Pete Travis (Dredd) from jean-Patrick Manchette novel
Cast: Sean Penn (Milk), Javier Bardem (No Country for Old Men)
Rating: R
Runtime: 115 min.
by John DeSando
With Liam Neeson leading the action-thriller way (Run All Night) at the film dead-zone time of year, it makes sense to copy the formula and pocket the millions. Sean Penn, no slouch as an actor, has possibly been seduced by the circumstances by having Neeson’s director, Pierre Morel (Taken), direct him in a thriller so lame that the bull-fighting scene at the climax is an appropriate metaphor for the bull---- of the film as a whole.
Jim Terrier (Penn), an ex-mercenary sniper in the Congo, has become a target of other hit men for assassinating the minister of mines. Well, Jim needs to go after the men who are going after him. Such is the uncreative premise of a film that ignores the possible mine of material about multi-national corporations exploiting the resource-rich Democratic Republic of the Congo. Despite Pen’s Blood Diamond with Leo DiCaprio it is not.
But activist Penn had good intentions when he talked about doing the film: “What was important was that the epicenter of that narrative drive had a history of suffering intervention, be it political intervention or corporate intervention. . . . There were also some real-life parallels related to the mining interests that had happened there.” Sounds good but little of the do good trumps the canned action.
Besides shorting those noble subjects, Gunman mistakenly emphasizes a triangle among Jim, Felix (Javier Bardem), and Anna (Jasmine Trinca—an Isabella Rossellini sub if ever I saw one). The rivalry is embarrassingly overplayed but ends mercifully two-thirds of the way through. Why? Because time is needed for the bull fight cut in parallel with the confrontation between the major antagonists at the close. The film has enough bulls___ to warrant the bull fight metaphor.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JDeSando@Columbus.rr.com
