Sean Penn’s “The Gunman” is so fake “Taken,” they should call it “Faken”
Welcome back to “Worst Reviewed,” where we see the worst-reviewed movie of the week, as rated by the critics on Rottentomatoes.com and, if the suckage doesn’t kill us, we determine whether those critics are either haters or heroes.
This week’s worst-reviewed movie: “The Gunman,” starring Sean Penn
Tomatometer rating:14 percent
Sample bad review: “Imagine The Constant Gardener crunched back and forth through Google Translate in several Bantu languages, then fished out of a swamp with pages missing.”- Tim Robey, The Telegraph (U.K.)
What’s this about?: Sad-eyed, guilty mercenary former mercenary (Penn), who totally killed a government official in The Congo for money eight years previously while he was supposed to be digging wells for poor people or something, suddenly finds himself the target of an assassination
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The consensus: It’s Penn’s attempt to throw his hat into the overcrowded older guy action star ring, but that poor hat gets trampled to death under the weight of a zig-zagging script, a ridiculous love triangle, more than a whiff of sanctimony, native brown people used as convenient props and a raging Western savior complex, a completely gratuitous shirtless Sean Penn surfing scene that serves to remind everyone how hot 50-something Sean Penn is, tiny brief cameos by actors you want to see more than the lead, and yet another female character who exists only to be fought over, kidnapped and sexually assaulted, because girls don’t need personalities! In other words, no franchise for you, Spicoli! Take your pizza and go.
Do you agree?: A gazillion times over, y’all. A gazillion times.
What’s the worst part?: Where do I start? How about the fact that it’s obvious in the FIRST FIVE MINUTES of the movie the identity of at least one of the people who will eventually plot to kill Jim, so him having any question about it either means him he’s an awfully bad undercover mercenary or means I’ve seen too many stupid action movies?
OK, what else?: If you were a mercenary in a volatile country picked to be the shooter in a plot to kill a government minister and knew that the rule was that the shooter had to immediately leave the country, and knew that you were selected specifically by the creep so openly lusting after your pretty and personality-free girlfriend (Jasmine Trinca) that One Direction fans would be embarrassed by his obviousness, wouldn’t you call shenanigans? (I would use a stronger term than “shenanigans” but family newspapers and such) And if you don’t think that’s weird, again, aren’t you super bad at your job?
Anything else?: Blatant underuse of Idris Elba, who is billed as a co-star but shows up in the last, what, 20 minutes and has like 10 lines, all of which are sexy and interesting and much better than anything Sean Penn says. Also, action scenes that wind on too long and in too many public places without any bystanders going “Um, dude, why are you waving that gun around and chasing that obviously drugged woman?” And it’s so obvious that Penn went out of his way not to wear a shirt…at one point, he’s running around bare-chested except for a Kevlar vest. I am not a Kevlar vest wearing expert, but in every other movie I have seen, there are layers. Wouldn’t you want layers? What’s wrong with you?
That it?: Oh, don’t get me started on the supposedly fatal brain disorder that literally comes and goes whenever the plot needs it to.
So what’s the verdict: It’s one of those movies where it appears nobody actually read the script, or looked at the dailies, or said “Maybe this isn’t working.”