Review: 'The Gunman' fires too many blanks

• 2 stars %28out of 5%29
• Penn is incredibly fit%2C which we know because he takes his shirt off fairly often.
• Bardem and especially Elba are wasted in a by-the-numbers script %28written in part by Penn%29.

What are you doing to plan for retirement?

Putting money in a 401(k) plan? Other investments? Socking away cash under a mattress?

If you're a Hollywood actor aging out of the traditional leading-man bracket, you may have a different option.

Become an action star.

It seems counterintuitive to start running around cracking heads and shooting people when, in theory, you should be slowing down. But look at what action films have done for Liam Neeson and his "very particular set of skills" — they've given his career an unlikely boost.

Will it work for others? Sean Penn is trying to find out, it seems. He stars in "The Gunman," a different sort of role for the two-time Oscar winner. His character, too, has deadly skills that he uses when the occasion calls for them, and it calls for them often.

Lest you wonder whether this is a conscious effort, well, the director of "The Gunman" is Pierre Morel — who directed "Taken," the film that solidified Neeson's later-in-the-game status as an action star.

As for Penn, a legitimately great actor, well, it's a work in progress. "The Gunman" is a predictable slog through action-movie tropes, and Penn's intensity isn't a good fit.

On the other hand, he looks as if he's really been working out.

The film begins in 2006 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Penn's Jim Terrier (woof!) ostensibly works as security at mining sites but in reality is an assassin. His girlfriend, Annie (Jasmine Trinca), a doctor on a humanitarian mission, doesn't know about his deadlier job. Nor does she suspect that Felix (Javier Bardem) works for the same outfit. She does suspect that Felix wants her to dump Jim for him, because he basically tells her every chance he gets.

The group assassinates the minister of mining, and Felix makes the call that makes Jim the trigger man. That means he has to leave the country immediately. It also means leaving Annie behind, with Felix on the case, so to speak.

Eight years later, Jim is back in the Congo, this time doing humanitarian work. He's haunted by his past, and in more ways than one: A group of men shows up where he's working and tries to kill him.

So Jim has to figure out who and why, though men with blood on their hands often have the why part figured out already. He travels to London and tracks down an old friend, Stanley (Ray Winstone, rumpled and disheveled; you can practically smell the cigarette smoke on him), who knows where to turn up answers. He also checks in with former Congo colleague Cox (Mark Rylance), who now works — in bespoke suits — for the company that employed them years before.

All this leads Jim to Barcelona, where Felix is a successful businessman — and married to Annie. Nevertheless, Annie is soon running for her life alongside Jim, from bad guys whose identity comes as no surprise.

It's all workmanlike, in part because a few interesting ideas aren't explored enough. One is the setting — settings, really. For the most part, they serve simply as backdrops. At other times they're strange: the movie's climax takes place at a bullfight, a sport Barcelona banned in 2012.

Another is Jim's illness. All of his special-ops work back in the day has created a kind of plaque on his brain that leads to memory loss, mirroring early Alzheimer's. The doctor stresses that the situation is dire and that Jim needs to stay calm and quiet.

With killers on your tail, that's difficult. But the malady comes and goes, whenever it's convenient to the script (written by, among others, Penn).

But the biggest waste is Idris Elba. He gets second billing but shows up only toward the end, and then briefly, as an Interpol agent. He sits down beside Jim on a park bench and they engage in a ridiculous roundabout conversation that uses a tree-house metaphor to mask what they're really talking about. Elba is a terrific actor and a strong screen presence, but this tests even his abilities.

Through it all races Penn with a concussive force (his illness, when it shows up, causes horrible headaches, something Morel mimics throughout the film). He's shirtless some of the time, looking like he does about 1,000 sit-ups a day.

Good for him. He's 54, after all. Nobody said the aging-actor-action-star retirement plan was easy.

'The Gunman'

2 stars (out of 5)

Director: Pierre Morel.

Cast: Sean Penn, Idris Elba, Jasmine Trinca.

Rating: R for strong violence, language and some sexuality.

Reach Goodykoontz at bill.goodykoontz@arizonarepublic.com. Facebook: facebook.com/GoodyOnFilm. Twitter: twitter.com/goodyk.