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"2 Gun" Salute

In a post-"Lethal Weapon" age it's easy to imagine the trepidation with which any screenwriter must approach a "buddy action film". Love it or hate it, the Danny Glover-Mel Gibson franchise set the bar by which all subsequent attempts are judged. The same can be said of any post-"Bourne" spy-out-in-the-cold project. So what's a screenwriter to do? In the case of "2 Guns", combine them. And, what do you know? It's a pretty effective combination.

Based on the graphic novel of the same name by Steven Grant, "2 Guns" is the story of two street-level criminals who set out to steal a Mexican drug cartel's money and in the process unintentionally open a much larger can of worms. Finding themselves in much more trouble than they had intended (more trouble than messing with a Mexican drug cartel's money...think about that), they have no one to trust but each other, and that trust is tenuous at best. That's pretty much all the plot that is required as enemy after enemy stacks up (US Navy, DEA, CIA) and increasingly destructive gun fights ensue.

Screenwriter Blake Masters ("Law & Order: LA") does nice job of managing all of the characters and interspersing exposition and explosion in a way that neither ever seems to be dominating which is impressive for a movie of this type, where third acts frequently descend into a fury of fireballs. But even he seems to occasionally get lost in some of the twists and turns and shifting loyalties. The climactic scene, for instance, has two of the characters working together when the last the audience had seen of them they were shooting at each other. If you really stop and work it out you can assume that they met up somewhere, declared a truce, and worked out a plan, but that's an unnecessary assumption that a line or two of dialogue could have resolved. Still, to offset that, and some other medium-sized plot holes, the dialogue is snappy and most of the double- and triple-crosses are not at all telegraphed. And huge bonus points for the why-have-I-never-thought-of-that approach to neutralizing the police before the bank heist.

Director Baltasar Kormákur ("Contraband") shows some impressive action chops, keeping the audience in the middle of the action and doing it without overuse of hand-held. He understands the audience's need for an occasional wide shot as people go crashing through windows and gangs of gunslingers shoot it out in dark, tight, spaces. He also creates a very effective sense of distortion between the Old West and modern day, in the same way that will be familiar to anyone who follows "Justified".

With that all said, what raises "2 Guns" from being standard fare to being memorable are the leads. Denzel Washington ("The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3") and Mark Wahlberg ("Max Payne"), as the titular two guns, Bobby and Stig, make a surprisingly good duo and their on-screen chemistry makes the occasional dimestore-Tarantino dialogue (the opening argument about breakfast, for instance) genuinely amusing, where it could easily have been embarrassing. Wahlberg's gee-whiz approach to his character nicely balances Denzel's jaw-clenched bad-ass approach to his, which allows the jaded audience to see this gritty world through fresh eyes. It's not that Stig is an innocent, far from it, it's just that his goofy naivety gives new life to some of the old tropes.

It's also great to see Bill Paxton ("Apollo 13") back to exorcizing some of his inner demons as amoral CIA Agent 'Earl'. Having watched his brilliant but starched turn on "Big Love" for years, "2 Guns" reminds us that this is the guy who has created such memorable bad-asses as Dad Meiks, Pvt. Hudson, and Chet. He does this through a sense of quiet violence, though, not through unnecessarily over the top craziness. He actually acts the kind of role that John Travolta would scream. His Russian roulette routine, for instance, is genuinely unnerving due less to the risk of bullet and more to the sense of calm that he brings to it. Sadly, Edward James Olmos is not allowed to bring his 'A' game, relegated to being little more than a stereotypical Hollywood drug lord. He's menacing, no doubt, but that's something he can do in his sleep. Paula Patton also gets set up to fail, shifting loyalties in a barely explicable way that serves solely to move along the plot at the expense of any character continuity. James Marsden is his usual wooden self and one can only hope that the inclusion of Fred Ward in the cast was an intentional red-herring, otherwise it's a sad waste.

"2 Guns" is a movie for exactly the type of people who might go to see a movie named "2 Guns", and they will enjoy it immensely. It'll keep you engaged and keep you guessing, which is far more than can be said for most of its peers.