The Gunman

Co-writer/producer Sean Penn's globetrotting thriller (an apparent vanity project) treads familiar Liam Neeson ground, with Penn playing another aging-but-tough action hero. Set in 2006, the prologue finds ex-Special Forces mercenary Jim Terrier (Penn) and his idealistic girlfriend Annie (Jasmine Trinca) in the Democratic Republic of Congo. When Jim's supervisor, Felix (Javier Bardem), who has the hots for Annie, dispatches Jim to kill the Minister of Mining, he winds up being forced to flee the country. Suffering from head trauma, Jim returns to Africa eight years later for a water project and discovers that he has been targeted for assassination. The obvious suspect is Felix (now married to Annie), but it could also be his former boss (Mark Rylance); either way, dangerous hit-men pursue Jim from London to Gibraltar to Barcelona. Based on Jean-Patrick Manchette's 1981 novel The Prone Gunman, filmmaker Pierre Morel's gritty, generic guy film is macho but not mucho else (scantily clad Italian actress Trinca is given a purely reactive role). The result is predictably tiresome, full of bloody fistfights, formulaic shoot-outs, and picturesque chases, all signifying very little. Optional. (S. Granger)