[h2]8. No, 2 Guns, you cannot make broad, ‘patriotic’ political statements while telling a story that simultaneously demonizes the CIA, NCIS, and DEA as irredeemably evil[/h2]
As indicated by that confusing plot description above, 2 Guns paints American Intelligence agencies in about the most negative light possible. The entire Naval chain of command is either incompetent or corrupt, the DEA weak-willed and inept, and the CIA is not only wicked enough to store away millions and millions of illicitly-earned dollars, but will kill, maim, and torture people in order to get it back.
Now, I trust American government about as far as I can throw it at this point (that the film never touches upon the NSA is probably a mercy), but it is a pretty big leap to go from “American intelligence agencies are ineffectual and overreaching” to “Good God, our entire government is run by cartoon villains.” I cannot even understand the creative motivation behind this – there really is not anything fun about having the majority of the villains be American agents (or at least, no fun 2 Guns effectively exploits) – but I suspect that, under different circumstances wherein the film made no claims to meaningful reality, I would not mind this problem so much, and chalk it all up to the general sense of cartoonish wackiness on display.
But the problem is, 2 Guns actually does try to relate a ‘message’ in the midst of all this, and it comes across as unbelievably tin-eared. Wahlberg’s character, as a member of the Navy, makes on several occasions broad statements about what it means to be a Naval officer, the true nature of brotherhood, why people fight in the armed forces, etc. And I think they are all messages I could easily get behind if the plot was not actively demonizing the very entity he is talking about at every single turn. Every single one of these ‘message’ moments comes across as wildly disingenuous (and just a little bit offensive) when the movie spends its entire runtime pissing all over every military and intelligence agency it can think of, and Wahlberg and Washington themselves wind up killing a fairly large number of seemingly innocent soldiers. When the film cannot even pander to its audience effectively, something has gone dreadfully wrong.
[h2]7. That one stupid faux-cool guitar cue[/h2]
I still cannot decide if this part of the movie is lazy and terrible, or somewhat commendably disengaged. Either way, composer Clinton Shorter saw fit to compose only a few extremely basic musical themes for the movie, and there is one in particular we hear so many times that it practically becomes a running joke. It is a simple, repetitive guitar cue, a filtered, staccato melody that attempts to sound ‘cool,’ but tries so hard it quickly becomes self parody. The film does such a poor job characterizing Washington or Wahlberg, or giving them interesting things to do, that it has to rely on the music to make them seem awesome, and by the time we get to the climax, and the guitar cue comes in for the 473rd time to underline how cool Denzel Washington is, I could not stop myself from laughing. It is either lazy, winkingly self-aware, or both, but no matter what, if you feel you need a guitar cue this cloying to make someone as awesome as Denzel Washington seem cool, you have wandered seriously astray.
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