Mark Wahlberg, 'Mile 22' mount dizzying, disorienting assault

Mark Wahlberg's "Mile 22" character James Silva has a tick where he snaps a yellow rubber bracelet against his wrist. He does this many, many times throughout this all-out assault of a movie, which seems to have been shot and edited with the singular purpose of leaving the audience confused and disoriented at every turn. This restless camera can't even hold still during a simple scene of dialogue, and that snapping sound is actually one of the more orienting things.

Ah yes, you think, it's Silva calming his mind, which is apparently quicker than most people's resulting in both extreme intelligence and extreme anger, or so we're told in a similarly frenetic opening credits sequence. His mother gave him the bracelet so that he could snap it as a reminder to pause. While that's nice for Silva, it's also incredibly annoying for the audience.

On a broad scale, this movie is about counterterrorism efforts and trying to predict the unpredictable. There's a nuclear substance at large which, if released into the atmosphere, would be like "Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined." A man, Li Noor (the incredible marital arts stuntman Iko Uwais), comes to a U.S. Embassy in Asia saying he has the locations of the missing substance but will only give them up in exchange for asylum. So Silva and his paramilitary CIA unit, including Lauren Cohan, Ronda Rousey and Carlo Alban, quit their jobs and become "ghosts" to take on the extremely dangerous operation of transporting Li 22 miles to a plane that will get him to the U.S. Overwatch is a "higher form of patriotism," John Malkovich's director-type opines.

"Mile 22" is one of the more disappointing collaborations between Wahlberg and director Peter Berg, who also made "Lone Survivor," "Patriots Day" and "Deepwater Horizon." "Mile 22" is the first that wasn't ripped from the headlines and a clear attempt at a franchise. While this shadowy unit seems fair game, Silva is a horrifyingly bad character, poorly developed and with no redeemable qualities.

That's a shame, because there are genuinely interesting elements about this film, like how at least 50 percent of the humans here, from intelligence officers, to code breakers, to ambassadors, are women. Not that that should be notable, but it is. Also Uwais has a truly stunning action sequence involving a gurney that is not to be missed. But the rest of the action is so obscured you're not even sure who or what you're watching most of the time. The only time it slows down is to show some of the most gruesome ways to kill someone that have been committed to screen this year.