2 Guns

Year 6, Day 258 - 9/15/14 - Movie #1,849

BEFORE: Linking from "The Machinist", Christian Bale was also in "The Fighter" with Mark Wahlberg (last seen in "Ted"). 

THE PLOT:  A DEA agent and a naval intelligence officer find themselves on the run after a botched attempt to infiltrate a drug cartel. While fleeing, they learn the secret of their shaky alliance: Neither knew that the other was an undercover agent.

AFTER: This is my third trip across the Mexico border in the last week, and as a plot point, that's wearing a little thin.  Also wearing thin is starting a film with the "splash scene" and then rewinding to show how we got there.  This film does that without any titles like "one week ago" to let you know we've gone back in time, so some people might easily think that the main characters robbed the same bank twice.  

The story is really sketchy, I think the plan was just to cast some charismatic actors in the lead roles, and hope that people would like their characters by extension, without pausing to think about the wrongness of their actions.  Either that, or they just wanted to rip off "The Departed", which also had two undercover operatives who were unaware of each other's status.  

Technically this is another "heist" film, but an attempt to steal money from a drug cartel's bank results in more money than expected, and then every party wants to get its hands on the larger sum.  The problem, as I see it, is that THREE of the four parties involved work for the U.S. government.  And of those three parties, two of those (the U.S. Navy and the D.E.A.) shouldn't be using stolen money to supplement their budgets.  The third is the C.I.A., and who knows what's going on over there.  

It's clear that some screenwriter didn't think too long about this, so maybe I shouldn't either.  But I'd like to think that there's some procedure where different divisions of the U.S. government could talk to each other, instead of shooting first and asking questions later.  Also I kind of doubt that the U.S. Navy, an honorable organization from everything I've seen, wouldn't be interested in stolen money from drug cartels.  But what do I know?

Also starring Denzel Washington (last seen in "Ricochet"), Bill Paxton (last seen in "U-571"), Paula Patton (last seen in "Hitch"), Edward James Olmos (last seen in "The Green Hornet"), James Marsden (last seen in "X-Men: Days of Future Past"), Robert John Burke (last seen in "Tombstone"), with a cameo from Fred Ward.

RATING: 4 out of 10 safe deposit boxes