THE GUNMAN (2015)

Genre: Action/Thriller
Director: Pierre Morel
Cast: Sean Penn, Javier Bardem, Ray Winstone, Jasmine Trinca, Mark Rylance, Peter Franzén, Daniel Adegboyega, Idris Elba
Runtime: 1 hr 55 mins
Rating: NC-16 (Violence and Scene of Intimacy)
Released By: Shaw
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 9 April 2015

Synopsis: Two-time Academy Award-winner Sean Penn stars in THE GUNMAN, an explosive, international action-thriller from Pierre Morel, the director of TAKEN. Terrier, an international operative who is betrayed by the organization he worked for, must go on the run in a relentless game of cat and mouse across Europe.

Movie Review:

You can’t blame Sean Penn for wanting to be the next Liam Neeson. After all, both are critically acclaimed actors who were constant mentions on annual honour rolls, and both had been experiencing a drought of dramatically compelling roles in recent years. Then Neeson reinvented himself as a geriatric action hero with a nondescript B-action movie called ‘Taken’, and has since been enjoying some of the biggest box-office successes of his entire career built on the same or similar profiles. So Penn, whose last commercial release as lead was with Nicole Kidman in ‘The Interpreter’ a decade ago, has decided to follow suit, enlisting Neeson’s ‘Taken’ director Pierre Morel to do a similar career turn-around.

Except that Penn can’t quite figure out just what he wants his movie to be, and ends up with a hodgepodge as dull as its title itself. On one hand, it sets itself up as a social drama that intends to expose corporate exploitation of the African continent; on the other, it wants to be a gripping suspense thriller about a man on the run from the ghosts of his past. On both counts, it leaves its audience wanting; in fact, not only does it fail to satisfy, it ends up being ingratiating for wasting a good part of its first act as a tiresome soap opera involving a woman caught between her past and present lover.

Yes, we kid you not. While waiting for Penn’s titular character to pull out his weapon and shoot some of ‘em bad guys up, we are forced to endure at least three clichéd exchanges between Jim Terrier (Penn), the fiancé he was forced to leave behind eight years ago when he fled the Democratic Republic of Congo after assassinating its Minister for Mining, and his former handler who has since married the fiancé and is preparing to adopt a kid with her. Penn is a good enough actor to know how to pretend enough to emote, but Javier Bardem, who plays his love rival Felix, is downright annoying, not least for the fact that the actor (who was so good as the bad guy in ‘Skyfall’) turns in a one-dimensionally over-the-top smarmy performance all the way through.

By that point of time, the politics of the story are done and dusted, forgotten in just under fifteen minutes after Jim leaves the Congo which he returned to for London, then Barcelona, and finally to Gibraltar in order to meet with his ex-cohorts and uncover just who among them is trying to silence him for good. The various locations around Europe do make for some gorgeous settings for sure, but the subsequent narrative is as primitive as the country that he came from. Besides Felix (who is eliminated at the halfway mark), there are only two other characters Jim consorts with – one, an English pal named Stanley (Ray Winstone) who also used to be a gun-for-hire; and two, his former colleague Cox (Mark Rylance) who is now a top-level executive with a private security firm – and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out which one of them wants him dead.

But because Penn, who co-wrote the screenplay based on a 1981 pulp novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette with Don MacPherson and Pete Travis, insists on building a character study around Jim, we are forced to contend with clunky exposition that doesn’t make us care one bit more about his character, or for that matter, the fact that he experiences bouts of intense post-concussion syndrome because of the nature of the work that he used to do. Unlike Neeson’s character in 'Taken', Penn’s is simply out to protect himself, and remains utterly unlikeable through and through. For a movie clearly conceived to be Penn’s film, the fact that we cannot quite relate to his character simply means that we are left out in the cold.

That pretty much also sums up the few action setpieces which Morel choreographs with little imagination or flair. Whether a shootout at a countryside mansion or another at an aquarium theme park, it isn’t anything that you cannot find on a direct-to-video release these days. Only in the climactic showdown set in and around the storied Spanish toreadors arena known as La Monumental do we see some of that panache in the first (and best) ‘Taken’, but it is too little and frankly too late. In truth, Morel’s deliberate attempt to humanise Penn’s character consistently undermines the action – not only because the head pain and blurred vision that kicks in whenever Jim has the upper hand gets repetitive very quickly, but also because it leaves Penn devoid of any “particular set of skills” and any discernible reason why he should emerge relatively unscathed out of every single confrontation.

Despite what promise it may have shown at the start for being a politically aware action thriller, ‘The Gunman’ fails to make good on any count. Its offers no more than platitudes about its topically relevant premise. Its action is too perfunctory to generate any real excitement. Worst of all, it gets muddled up in a mawkish love triangle during the first half and an predictable mystery in the second. The dialogue is terrible, especially a cringe-worthy metaphor about building treehouses that Idris Elba’s Interpol agent uses to persuade Penn to come clean. Perhaps the only good thing to come out of it is Penn’s sculptured body, which the film never fails to emphasise at every opportunity, and that we are sure his current squeeze, Charlize Theron, would be quite happy about. 

Movie Rating:

(As tired and dull as Sean Penn’s scraggly look throughout the whole movie, this attempt to make a middle-aged action hero out of him is a lamentable backfire for its well-respected star)

Review by Gabriel Chong