The Gunman ***

Perhaps Sean Penn is hoping that Taken director Pierre Morel will help turn him carve out an ‘aging action hero career’ – like he has Liam Neeson – in The Gunman, based on a novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette? Penn certainly has hit the gym for the part (and a tanning salon), never missing a beat to get torso-naked in this latest action flick. And you can’t deny the 54-year-old the exposure – he looks super fit for it. It’s just the film’s credibility lets him down, rather than Penn’s physical presence.

Penn plays Jim Terrier, a former Special Forces op, turned security personnel (Gunman) for hire, tasked with protecting mine workers in the Congo. After turning mercenary assassin and killing the country’s minister of mines for an undisclosed multinational, Terrier goes into hiding, leaving behind medic girlfriend Annie (Jasmine Trinca). Fast forward a few years and Terrier is now security for a quango on the same continent. One day he is hunted down by a hit squad in connection with the former minister’s killing. Terrier goes on an international hunt of his own to find who is behind the hit. Meanwhile, ex-girlfriend Annie is living with the dubious Felix (Javier Bardem) in Spain, himself involved in the whole assassination plot in the Congo, but now a businessman.

The combination of corruption, money and power is always a powerful film aphrodisiac, as The Gunman proves and relies on. Kind of like a cross between Taken (for the revenge part) and Blood Diamond (starring DiCaprio, for the location), the film portrays the whole dangerous setting at the start and introduces Terrier to us as someone who hasn’t quite got his moral compass working. Penn is suitably twitchy in the role, suspicious of everything and obviously not completely straight as a die.

It’s after the assassination, a few years later, that things make you pause for thought and think, ‘Hang on? What’s made Terrier a changed man all of a sudden?’. Is it a bout of guilt? He’s still carrying a gun but now he’s on the peace-keepers’ side. Maybe the implication is Terrier goes where the cash is, which makes you ask the question that surely he’d be doing something for bigger bucks than for a quango? Still, the pace of the film – which never has a dull moment in the first half – never lets you dwell too long and find such inconsistencies, or it has Penn get naked to through such thoughts off course.

It’s Bardem again in another ‘throwaway’ role that allows him to go crazy (as usual) before he is disposed of. As much as Bardem plays one of the best ‘crazies’ it feels a touch samey for the talented actor in this. Even more shocking is the albeit brief appearance of Idris Elba whose part could have been played by any bit actor of any cop drama fame as Elba is totally underused.

Still, if you can’t get enough Bond/Bourne-style shoot-outs, escapes, booby traps and punch-ups, The Gunman delivers more than enough to delight in, accumulating in the bull ring at the end with a very ‘abrupt’ demise. There is also an even more dubious finale that has you counting on your fingers just how old Terrier could be and how being away has made him even more youthful (and possibly toned). It’s a Penn vanity project, an action-revenge, ‘by-the-numbers’ offering that could have been more credible and deeper in purpose with better writing. After all, its mature star is more than willing to throw his weight around to portray its energetic protagonist.

3/5 stars

By @FilmGazer

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