by DAVID WALSH
Directed by Pierre Morel, the French-born filmmaker responsible for Taken (2008), The Gunman is another action film, this time featuring Sean Penn. Penn plays Jim Terrier, whom we first see in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2006 working as a mercenary. One of a team of four, Terrier draws the “short straw” and is assigned by the team’s liaison, Felix (Javier Bardem), the task of assassinating the country’s minister in charge of mining, whose policies threaten the multinational firm that hired the mercenaries.
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This is not a good film. It is largely a clichéd scaffolding for certain violent set pieces, which are interesting as formal exercises of a kind, but have no long-lasting emotional or any other kind of impact, except to further inure audiences to killing and brutality. Like the lead figures in other ultraviolent American films at present, as long as Penn looks troubled by the corpses for which he is responsible, anything goes.
His performance lacks spontaneity and any genuine sense of inner turmoil, although Penn winces and moans through much of The Gunman, possibly to encourage the viewer to forget that his character’s history is a filthy one, as are his associates. One such, for example, Terrier’s English friend Stan (Ray Winstone), is enlisted to help obtain an apartment and other necessities for the American mercenary in Barcelona without the latter’s presence coming to the attention of the authorities. Stan does so, as he explains, through old pals from the Spanish Legion, i.e., the elite military unit that fought to bring Franco’s fascism to power in the Civil War and has participated in every bloody colonial operation of Spanish imperialism.
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