Even for an action movie, The Gunman is ridiculously, almost courageously, dumb. It’s also boring. So it’s got that going for it.
The Gunman opens with a montage of news footage from the Democratic Republic of Congo, during which we learn that the Congo is wracked with horrible violence and devastating disease because of the corporations, man. They’re sowing chaos in what would otherwise be a peaceful paradise to obtain diamonds and rare earth metals.
UN Peacekeepers and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) maintain some semblance of order and distribute medical care, food, and other necessities. Hired to protect one of these NGOs is Jim Terrier (Sean Penn), who develops a conscience following his assassination of the DRC mining minister who had threatened his paymasters’ operations.
He’s forced to flee the country and leave behind his love, Annie (Jasmine Trinca), a doctor working for the NGO he was protecting as cover for his exploits as an assassin. We pick up the story seven years later: Jim is now working for a NGO himself, building wells in the Congo. But his past continues to haunt him when hired thugs try to take him out at the jobsite.
Jim figures the attack is a result of his past work in the country, so he tracks down the guys he worked with—including Felix (Javier Bardem), who is now married to Annie and trying to meld the worlds of business and philanthropy even further. In a turn of events that surprises no one, it turns out that the company is eliminating its former contractors in order to cover up the heinous deeds it committed in the past.
Oh, did I mention that Jim now suffers from brain trauma? Post-concussion syndrome. Sorry, forgot about that. But don’t worry: The Gunman often forgets about it too. Meaning that Jim will occasionally vomit and almost pass out after getting into a ticky-tack bar fight, but isn’t terribly bothered when, say, a Claymore mine goes off a few feet away from him.
It’s the worst kind of plot device: a form of cinematic Kryptonite that brings the heretofore unstoppable hero to his knees at just the right moment and pops up whenever the writers (Don Macpherson, Pete Travis, and Penn) need to slow things down for a moment.
And slow things down they do. Constantly. For a movie that’s being marketed as an action-thriller and was directed by the guy who made Taken, The Gunman is a real slog. This isn’t a Taken clone so much as a Bizarro Taken: For the first hour or so, we’re not treated to a single scene that even approximates excitement.
What we are treated to instead are several discursive polemics about the evils of our corporate overlords. The Gunman feels as though it was written by a group of college freshmen exposed to their first taste of Marx and filled with the urgent need to share with the rubes back home the knowledge they have acquired. (South Park parodied this sort expertly a few years back.)
A word to the wise: Audiences will excuse your didacticism if you give them something enjoyable to watch (see: Snowpiercer), but are far less forgiving when you package your global civics lesson within a slow-paced, plodding plot. And The Gunman is nothing if not slow-paced and plodding—when it isn’t ham-handed and obvious. Avoid at all costs.