We’re south of the border, down Mehico way with 2 Guns.
A cartel baron with bad skin, surrounded by his gang of thugs, is negotiating a deal with a couple of gringos, Bobby (Denzel Washington) and Stig (Mark Wahlberg).
Who is the coolest? Who the toughest?
Four live chooks are buried in the sand, with only their heads exposed. The goons have been shooting at them but missing. As he and Bobby are leaving, Stig swings around (like Sundance after somebody asks in the iconic buddy movie that is a million times better than this, ‘hey kid, are you that good?’) and, with gunslinger elan, noisily decapitates the birds.
I sighed and wished for the world to stop so that I could get off.
To say that this film is socially irresponsible and morally nobbled by macho posturing/homo-eroticism (the two can’t be separated), implausible to the point of outright stupidity and suffocatingly clichéd is to treat it with kid gloves.
The pair are undercover agents – Stig for the Navy, while Trench has been on the DA’s case of snaring a Mister Big of the cocaine trade for three years.
Deb (Paula Patton), also with the Law, is Trench’s squeeze. She has a husky voice, long black hair, try-hard Latino sultriness and, perhaps because Patton was a drop-out from Central Casting dramatic class, an embarrassing woodenness.
The bad dude is Earl, played by Bill Paxton, who seemed much more believable when he was managing his household of three wives in TV’s ‘Big Love’.
Not surprisingly – nota bene: there is not one iota of originality in the script – both men have been set up by bent superiors, so amid all of the double crosses and close calls, they are forced to increasingly rely on each other, despite not knowing the other’s true status.
They do it in a canter, drily wisecracking as they blow things up, survive car crashes that would leave you or me in a wheelchair and shoot people with gay abandon.
Inevitably, it’s a case of two guns, no brains.
~ John Campbell