REVIEW - 2 GUNS

Just 2? The film industry ought to be bloody thankful for guns. A lot of films plainly wouldn't exist were it not for guns. Practically, their uses are limited, but narratively? Here's an example: your screenplay has too many characters. What do you do? Shoot one of them! Another example: your film doesn't have a viable ending. What do you do? Shoot everyone! What about this: you don't actually know how to write dialogue. Easy, let the guns do all the talking! This is a film where people shoot corpses. They do this because they can, and probably because they can't do anything else. We've progressed to the stage now where that hokey old trope of the shooter who never misses has become a legitimate character trait. Nobody actually accomplishes anything of any significance in 2 Guns without the immediate aid of a firearm. A mischievous disrespect for government-backed authorities such as the military and the CIA, though, helps to neutralise the sour taste that might leave in your mouth. In between the bits where people get shot, 2 Guns is a baffling film, aiming in a multitude of directions at once, and landing a fair few of its attempts too. It has a nonchalant, wayward attitude that's pretty winning, with two fingers cheekily flicked up at coherence and clarity at all times. No doubt that Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg are sleeping their way through this, but they do so with such insouciant aplomb that it'd be dishonest of me to grumble. At one point, Denzel blows an entire building up just so he can evade police capture, and possibly kills plenty of people in the process, and I still like him. If Denzel has played Osama bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty, I'd have been on his side. He even does his own stunts, such as running through a foyer, and running through another foyer. The film's indifference toward its attention-deficit plot means that it has no regard for pacing, so it feels quite long, and the climax is absurd, but if you squint, you can just about pretend to see tongue, squatting neatly there in cheek. Director Baltasar Kormakur manages to find the occasional opportunity to squeeze a woman into the frame, which might not be a positive thing any more, seeing as it's no longer the year 1812.