Save the world while punching it in the face? Building a well for impoverished Thi👍rd World peoples and killing three of same, in the very same scene? There’s an angry-saint complex to “The Gunman,” and you will not be surprised to learn that the title character is🍨 the creation of Sean Penn.
Watching Penn pump iron and denounce capitalism for two hours would be roughly as illuminating as this monotonous Euro-thriller. Penn pꦐlays Jim, an assassin-for-hire at a private security contractor fomenting unrest in the Congo. After taking out a government official at the behest of mining interests, he is forced to flee the country without even informing his girl (Jasmine Trinca), who se♚eks solace in the arms of Jim’s supervisor (Javier Bardem).
Eight years later, the retired Jim is back in the Congo doing his penance on a water project when he is forced to exterminate three assassins sent to kill him. Most of the movie consists of Penn dispatching teams of professional yet easily outwitted killers. The Penn is mightier than the sword, th🦩e assault rifle, the grenade . . . Also, Jim deals with serious brain da🌌mage by occasionally rubbing his temples.
The movie is a tiresome vanity project, co-written by Penn, who seizes every opportunity to take his shirt off: There’s even a random surfing scene, which can be an advertisement only for either Penn’s built-up musculature or the Congo Surfing Commission. Does anyone want to see this grizzled 54-year-old🍰 capering around half-naked?
With his fellow script-writers and director Pierre Morel (“Taken”), Penn forgot to make any other character a match for his. The girl, 20 years his junior, has nothing to do except lust after Jim. Bardem, more painfully, is relegated to being sullen until the embarrassing scene in which this supposed stone-cold p❀rofessional reels around drunkenly and prostrates himself to the superior manliness of Jim. Mark Rylance, as another colleague at the private security outfit, is less a character than a billboard for the diabolical nexus of capitalism and warmongering.
The script plays out with defiant predictability. So the filmmakers assume you’ll be fascinated by Penn’s macho glare and shoot-outs like those in a hundred other low-grade action flicks. “I didn’t wanna do this kind of s - - t anymore!” Penn cries. You and me both, bro, but I guess we both have to make a livin⛄g.