Critic Reviews

The most compelling performance here belongs to the Indonesian actor and martial artist Iko Uwais, who became famous in The Raid movies. Here, he plays the “asset” who must be taken out of the country. Uwais’ hand-and-foot battles are genuinely explosive and when he’s not fighting, he doesn’t say much, which is a welcome relief from all the rest of the babble.

Mile 22 is one nasty piece of work. It’s an action picture that’s hard-core to the core, populated entirely by killers with nary a truly sympathetic figure among them. But it does deliver.

Berg and Wahlberg deliver a relentlessly paced, addictively slick paramilitary thriller actively catering to fans of gonzo brutality and turbocharged machismo.

The short running length is a benefit because it means that Mile 22 doesn’t stick around long enough to wear out its welcome – a too-often evident problem in films of this sort.

Mile 22 is such a freakish chimera of disparate genre influences that it’s kind of fascinating.

The result is at times quite thrilling, and clocking in at 90 minutes, refreshingly concise.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

New paint can't hide the worn-out frame behind Mile 22, a gung-ho workout that pairs Mark Wahlberg and director Peter Berg for the fourth time. Cribbing from themselves as well as tons of other action films, they manage to throw enough firepower on the screen to placate genre fans.

Berg, when he wants to be, is a surgical craftsman of chaos. Yet Mile 22 has little weight or resonance.

It’s both a bit confusing and a bit confused. Fortunately, it’s also loaded with some of the crunchiest action scenes since the John Wick movies thanks to Indonesian martial-arts maestro Iko Uwais.