The Gunman

The Gunman’s director Pierre Morel has been a part of quite a few fun yet over the top films that I’ve absolutely loved; well thoroughly enjoyed anyway. And that’s the problem with him, 10 seconds after convincing yourself that his movies are good, this natural human element called intellect kicks in and you realize that all you really saw was over stylized trash that had a ton of car chases and explosions in it. But you know what, I like good looking trash and I’m not sorry for it either!

Morel directed From Paris with Love, Taken, and the actually very good District B13 while also working as the cinematographer for the movies War and Unleashed. So naturally he’d be the one you’d get to direct an international thriller about a gunman right?

Well after seeing the Gunman, the only thing he will be directing on American soil from now on will be the porn version of real movies. “Pierre Morel directs The Gunman 2: He’s Ready to Unload!” Sorry, I know that was low even for me but it’s been far too long since I’ve mentioned porn on this site.

But now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, The Gunman is about an old ex special forces team who now works in the private sector. They are on contract in the Congo to protect a humanitarian project but are also on location to assassinate the local president who was in charge of the mining contracts in Africa.

Sean Penn plays Terrier, the group’s most skilled gunman. He is the one chosen by the team’s leader Felix (Javier Bardem) to take out the president and is forced to immediately leave the country as a result of it. But in the process he has to leave the woman he loves behind without any explanation for it because the operation they undertook wasn’t entirely on the books. A few years pass by and Terrier seems to have finally moved on from his killing days as he’s now a part of a humanitarian effort himself. He is working peacefully in the Congo and is trying his best to make a difference in the world; that is until a non military unit randomly seeks him out and attempts to murder him.

He now must now find out why these people are coming after him and why they want him dead. His journey to find answers takes him back to people from his past, some of which are happy to see him and some that are not.

Now if Morel had approached this film the way he did Paris with Love, this could have been a really fresh movie. He instead tried his best to make an intelligent thriller that involved corrupt corporations and a complicated love story but sadly that just simply isn’t his bag. He needs to have athletic bad guys who have the ability to base jump from building to building while doing kung fu. He needs old men with automatic weapons that can take out entire Eastern European armies all by themselves.

And while there are a few fresh gun play scenes, especially the one that takes place in a mansion in the middle of Barcelona, there just aren't enough of them. Sean Penn is incredible shape for this movie, so physically he is able to play this part but the problem that lies with him is that he’s just so damn unlikable. This is something that’s plagued him his entire career and nothing happens in this movie to change it. You almost find yourself wishing that someone would take out his girlfriend just to so you can see his character lose in some way.

The movie drags on too long at times and you find yourself wondering why Idris Elba is even in the movie in the first place. It’s like when they advertised Steven Seagal in that airplane movie and he wound up only being in the first 15 minutes or so before he died! Thanks for making me waste $10 Hollywood! I’m already broke as it is.

Anyway, this movie isn’t terrible, it’s just that it’s one of those Netflix kind of movies that you watch oer a two day period. I give it a rating of kind of WEAK!