It’s almost reassuring in 2015 to still be able to walk out of a cinema and ask aloud and with feeling: How on Earth did that get made?
Perhaps in 1985, The Gunman would have made sense. Or at least its existence might have. In any era the plot wouldn’t make sense to a village idiot suffering a severe case of head trauma – but more of Sean Penn’s character shortly.
Apparently eight years ago Penn’s Terrier (no really, that’s his name) was part of a group who assassinated a political figure in the Democratic Republic of Congo and now his past is catching up in the form of a series of gunmen who washed out of Stormtrooper school for poor marksmanship and a series of Hollywood stars – Javier Bardem, Ray Winstone and Idris Elba – who all presumably have shadowy secrets that the producers of this monumental monstrosity threatened to reveal. There’s also an actress in this film but we won’t use her name in an effort to protect the innocent.
It’s clear at least why Penn took the gig. He gets to play a modern day James Bond, except one who has had a crisis of conscience and now digs wells in Africa to pay off his karmic debt while drawing attention to humanitarian issues in the third world. If that sounds like a horrible grinding of genre gears, that’s because it is. Oh and he has a head injury. Not enough to make him Jason Bourne, just Johnny TerriblePlotDevice.
The Gunman would have been a woeful straight-to-video disaster in the era of VHS versus Betamax. In the time of video on demand versus cinematic blockbuster, this is an act of terrible, tedious theatrical terrorism.
