The time of Peter Berg and Mark Wahlberg movies has run its course. They’ve rarely been great (Deepwater Horizon), but they’ve also never been as borderline unwatchable as their recent collaboration, Mile 22. It’s understandable when a director and an actor like working together and keep collaborating, but Berg and Wahlberg are playing into each other’s weaknesses, with Wahlberg’s characters highlighting Berg’s military fetish and Berg letting Wahlberg play vapid “heroes” who need to be the center of attention despite failing to do anything worthy of that attention. Mile 22 is particularly egregious because Wahlberg is so out of his depth playing a ruthless genius, and the script does him no favors with its unquestioning celebration of American military might where fallout isn’t considered; only that we weren’t violent enough in our imaginations in the first place.

James Silva (Wahlberg) is a paramilitary officer in an elite CIA task force that works with the intelligence team Overwatch led by “Bishop” (John Malkovich) who oversees a team of specialists that are also named after chess pieces. Sixteen months after a domestic mission that went south, Silva and his team are in Southeast Asia trying to find a deadly chemical agent. In walks Li Noor (Iko Uwais), a local officer with information on where to find the chemical agent. He’ll only give up its location if Silva and his team escort Li to an airfield and give him asylum in America. Faced with no other options, Silva and his team must make the 22-mile journey from the embassy to the airfield and get Li on the plane safely. Unfortunately, a team of Russian hackers have hacked into Overwatch and are tipping the scales in the corrupt local government’s favor.

To say that the screenwriting on Mile 22 is sloppy would be an understatement. It should be a straightforward, simple plot, not too dissimilar from Berg’s excellent The Rundown where a tough character has to escort another character to an airstrip. And yet Lea Carpenter’s screenplay can’t stop tripping over its own swinging dick. Rather than build up a relationship between Silva and his team, he’s just a raging asshole to everyone, and that’s his “character”. Also, even though Silva is supposedly a genius who thinks so fast he constantly needs to snap a rubber band on his wrist to calm down, neither he nor Overwatch stops to think, “Golly, we can see everything, but the bad guys are always one step ahead of us. How did that happen?” The movie prefers to just pile violence on top of violence, but none of it has weight because this is a world without friendship or camaraderie. It’s Lone Survivor minus caring what happens to your fellow soldiers, so the only thing left is for soldiers to do is to die well.

Berg’s love of the military is no secret, and in some ways, that’s admirable. Movies like Battleship, Lone Survivor, and to a lesser extent Patriots Day are about how men and women in uniform go above and beyond to try and fight as honorable warriors in a world that has no rules. But Berg’s movies never reckon with what a lawless world really means, so they just become empty celebrations of force. Nowhere is that clearer than in Mile 22 where the special agents operate under “a higher form of patriotism” but there’s no questioning of military might that can wipe anyone out at any time or the repercussions from such amoral actions. For Mile 22, violence is gratification, and the fallout of those actions is just a precursor to more violence. The cycle isn’t questioned, but celebrated, which makes for a deeply nihilistic and grotesque experience.

The only times where the violence is even remotely enjoyable is when Uwais is on screen because his martial arts acumen provides a bizarre form of escapism. Because few people in cinema can actually do what Uwais does, his violent attacks, brutal as they may be, at least provide a thrill that Mark Wahlberg firing an assault rifle can never hope to achieve. But even then, the screenplay fails because Li is an abysmal character. We can’t possibly hope to root for him because he’s basically willing to let thousands of people die in a chemical attack unless he personally gets asylum. He’s not a hero; he’s an opportunist in a world full of soulless opportunist.

Some may argue that that’s the point of Mile 22 (if there’s any point to be had in such mindless slaughter)--we live in an unjust world and it takes amoral men like Silva to provide any semblance of order. However, such a position would be mere sophistry, the kind of empty, rambling monologue that Silva is prone to give to let the audience know he is smart. Mile 22 doesn’t have the brains to back up its hollow morality, and it certainly doesn’t have a serviceable mouthpiece in Wahlberg.

Mark Wahlberg is not a bad actor, but his range is limited. He’s best when he’s playing a working-class guy or an outsider, which speaks to his talent because Wahlberg hasn’t been working class or an outsider since 1991. You let Wahlberg play a cop or a criminal, and he’s on easy street. He’s even given outstanding performances in Boogie Nights, I Heart Huckabees, and The Fighter. But his macho posturing comes off as consistently irritating when Mile 22 tries to push his brilliance. You almost feel like the movie is two seconds away from putting glasses on Silva so that we’ll buy him as intelligent. And yet his actions never show an intelligent person. He’s never ahead of the bad guys and he’s not exactly resourceful when he’s got Overwatch in his corner looking at every security camera, controlling every building, and able to order a drone strike at any time. So just loading him up with monologues and quotes makes him about as intelligent as an essay that starts off by quoting the dictionary.

Almost nothing in Mile 22 works as it should, and one would expect that collaborations between a director and an actor would yield stronger movies, not weaker ones. And yet as Mile 22 shows, neither Berg nor Wahlberg is anywhere close to operating at the top of their game with this movie. Rather than letting Wahlberg play a “brilliant” tough guy, the film would have been better served letting the enigmatic Li be the protagonist and showing off more of Uwais’ martial arts ability. Thankfully, that movie already exists. It’s called The Raid, and it offers a far better action experience than the pathetic excuse from Mile 22.

Rating: D-