“2 Guns” opens on a man in a diner, eating a donut, watching a bank across the street. That is the whole movie in one image: two things that do not belong together, sitting still, waiting to go wrong.
Trailer, via Sony Pictures Entertainment.
Washington and Wahlberg Are the Same Joke Twice
Bobby Trench (Denzel Washington) and Michael “Stig” Stigman (Mark Wahlberg) are criminals working together. Neither knows the other is a cop. Bobby is an undercover DEA Special Agent. Stig is an undercover Navy SEAL and Petty Officer 1st Class with the Office of Naval Intelligence. They have been assigned to investigate each other, and the mob has set them both up.
That is a clean premise. The film, directed by Baltasar Kormákur from a script by Blake Masters, gets one good idea out of it and then spends 109 minutes pretending it has more.
The source is a comic book series created by Steven Grant and Mateus Santolouco, published in 2007 by Boom! Studios. The adaptation keeps the double-cross structure and drops most of the teeth.
Washington plays the straight man. Wahlberg plays the loose one. This is the arrangement the movie sells, and it sells it hard. The problem is that both men are playing the same character: a professional liar who is very good at his job and mildly amused by everything. Washington’s Bobby is calmer. Wahlberg’s Stig is louder. That is the difference.
The $43 Million and the $3 Million
Here is the plot, and it is worth laying out because the movie’s real failure is structural.
Bobby and Stig meet drug lord Manny “Papi” Greco (Edward James Olmos) at his farm in Mexico. Papi hands Bobby a packet of cash instead of the cocaine he asked for. Bobby reports back to his superior, Special Agent Jessup (Robert John Burke), and fellow agent Deb Rees (Paula Patton), that he did not get the cocaine they need to convict Papi.
Bobby is sleeping with Rees. He tells her privately he will help Stig rob $3 million from Papi’s bank in Tres Cruces, Texas, to prosecute Papi for tax evasion.
Stig reports to his commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Harold Quince (James Marsden), who tells him to kill Bobby so the money can fund covert operations.
They rob the bank. The vault holds over $43 million, not $3 million. Stig follows orders to betray Bobby and escape with the money. He shoots him in the upper arm rather than killing him, then sees Bobby’s DEA badge and leaves him in the desert.
Stig brings in the money. Quince betrays him. Stig escapes.
Then Bill Paxton shows up as Earl, a man who interrogates everyone connected to the robbery and follows Bobby’s trail. Earl kills Jessup, frames Bobby, and lets him go, offering to clear his name if Bobby recovers the $43 million.
Paxton, Olmos and a Cast Doing More Than the Script
Paxton is the best thing in “2 Guns.” Earl is a smiling sadist who talks about his work like a man describing a hobby, and Paxton plays him with the exact amount of charm the part needs. He is the only person on screen who seems to be having a good time without the movie winking at us about it.
The supporting cast is stacked with people who deserve better material:
- Edward James Olmos as Papi Greco, the drug lord whose farm opens the film
- Paula Patton as Deb Rees, a DEA agent and Bobby’s mistress
- James Marsden as Lieutenant Commander Harold Quince, Stig’s commanding officer
- Fred Ward as Admiral Tuwey
- Robert John Burke as Special Agent Jessup
- Patrick Fischler as Dr. Ken
- Greg Sproles as Chief Lucas
Patton’s Rees is the film’s most wasted asset. She is a DEA agent and Bobby’s mistress, and the script gives her almost nothing to do with either fact.
The tagline — “Never rob a bank across from a diner with the best donuts in three counties” — is funnier than most of the dialogue.
What Kormákur Gets Right
Kormákur knows how to shoot a firefight. The action in “2 Guns” is clean, readable and mean. Bullets land. People bleed. The camera does not shake itself apart trying to sell chaos it has not staged.
The film runs 109 minutes and moves. It is billed as action, comedy and crime, and it delivers on the first and third. The comedy is where it stalls. The jokes are mostly Wahlberg saying something profane while Washington looks at him. That works once. It works maybe four times. It does not work for an hour and a half.
The central gag is that these two men keep discovering they are on the same side after trying to kill each other. The movie returns to that well constantly, and each return is a little less surprising than the last.
5.5 of 10
“2 Guns” was released in the United States on August 2, 2013, and it drew positive reviews from critics. That is a generous read. What is actually here is a mid-tier buddy action picture with two movie stars who have been handed a premise instead of a script.
The premise is good. The execution is not.
The $43 million versus $3 million twist is the movie’s one genuinely sharp idea — two men sent to steal a small, manageable sum and instead staring at a fortune neither of them can explain. That is a real complication, and it should reorganize everything that follows. Instead the film treats it as a punchline and moves on.
The betrayals stack up without ever landing. Quince betrays Stig. The mob betrays both of them. Earl is playing his own game. By the third act, nobody in the movie has a stable motive, which means nobody in the movie has stakes. A double-cross only means something if you understood the first arrangement.
Washington and Wahlberg are watchable. They are always watchable. But watchable is not the same as good, and “2 Guns” never figures out the difference. It has a great tagline, a strong opening image, a genuinely nasty villain in Paxton, and no idea what to do with any of them.
The donut joke is the best thing in it. That should tell you something.
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