Mark Wahlberg can churn out formulaic action thrillers in his sleep, with the genre becoming his bread and butter over the last two decades. Every now and again we get a reminder in something like The Fighter or All the Money in the World that there’s a talented actor underneath, but for the most part, the 49 year-old is happy to stick with what he knows best.
At the moment, that would seem to be his regular collaborations with filmmaker Peter Berg, and Wahlberg has headlined the Hancock director’s last five movies. Lone Survivor, Deepwater Horizon and Patriots Day are three of the leading man’s finest recent efforts, while their latest team-up in Spenser Confidential gave Netflix one of their most popular original movies ever and looks set to launch a franchise.
The fifth and most frequently forgotten pairing of the duo that we’ve right at this moment decided to rechristen WahlBerg is Mile 22, which arrived to little fanfare in August 2018. The actor stars as a CIA operative tasked with transporting a valuable asset to an extraction point, only for his team to meet a lot of resistance along the way.
Despite a solid premise and a cast more than familiar with the action genre that also includes former MMA star Ronda Rousey and The Raid‘s Iko Uwais, not to mention the always welcome John Malkovich as the resident exposition machine, Mile 22 bombed at the box office and just about recouped the $60 million budget in theaters. Still, it offers some decent thrills and is entertaining enough for what it is. The movie hits Netflix next month, too, on November 1st, and based on the success Wahlberg’s recent titles have found on the streaming service, it looks to be a virtual certainty to trouble the Top 10 most-watched list.