2 Guns

Rated 2.0

While Tom Cruise and Will Smith save the universe every other summer, Denzel Washington has carved out a middle-class niche for himself making relatively low-key genre films. His latest movie, 2 Guns, doesn't ask him or co-star Mark Wahlberg to bring anything more than charm to the table, and that's the problem. As undercover agents set up by their superiors and hunted by the CIA, Washington and Wahlberg can perform this Butch-and-Sundance Kid shtick in their sleep, and practically do. Their apathy apparently caught on, as the slack screenplay stumbles over loose ends, and director Baltasar Kormákur fails to find a consistent tone. Kormákur lets his stars preen like they're in Ocean's Fourteen one minute, casually endorses torture the next, and finally offers a lone female character so thoroughly exploited, it would make Peter Berg blush.