Clocking in at a comparatively lean 102 minutes, 2 Guns is a speedy and rumbustious buddy movie in which Bobby Trench (Denzel Washington) and Stig Stigman (Mark Wahlberg) form a wisecracking, fast-shooting duo forced to abandon their mutual suspicion and pool their wits to battle swarms of double-crossing bad guys. The two leads don't quite fizz like Butch and Sundance - Wahlberg as light comedian is like inviting Vladimir Putin to host Celebrity Masterchef - but there are several perfectly serviceable gags, while these days you can put ol' Denzel anywhere and he looks as comfortable as a cat snoozing on a sun-drenched windowsill.
But, this being 2013, mere actorly chemistry can never be enough. The plot is a twisted skein of skulduggery and bluff interspersed with spectacular and deafening set pieces, and what in a different type of movie (or TV show) might be treated as laudable true-blue American institutions are here quite the opposite. Both our protagonists are working undercover to try to bring down drug kingpin Papi Greco (Edward James Olmos, pictured below right), who's shuttling mountains of cocaine across the US-Mexican border, but at first neither realises that the other is on the payroll of a different agency. Stig is from US Navy intelligence which, far from resembling the upstanding Jethro Gibbs and his team from NCIS, is a nest of corrupt and merciless mercenaries. Trench, meanwhile, is a DEA agent.
The going gets really rocky when the CIA turn up, represented by Earl, played with sadistic relish by Bill Paxton. No pious Zero Dark Thirty-style hero worship of the Agency here, since Earl and his crew behave like a bunch of depraved debt collectors from the Cosa Nostra. It seems they think Stig and Bobby have helped themselves to the Agency's secret stash of cash.
Anyway there are plenty of bangs and oodles of bucks, but the piece walks a slightly unsettling line between the superficial slice of bang-'em-up entertainment it purports to be on one level, and something altogether pricklier and darker. The notion that covert government agencies are frequently up to their necks in amoral lawlessness is hardly new, but here director Baltasar Kormákur (who also worked with Wahlberg on last year's Contraband) presents the USA's southern border as a virtual free-fire zone teeming with secret operatives gone rogue (Bill Paxton and the CIA come calling, pictured below).
There's a striking scene where our boys have to sneak back across the US border at night, using a plausible-looking people-smuggling route, which veers towards documentary reportage, as if the director was trying to smuggle a little social realism between the cracks of his multiplex popcorn-buster. An exhibition of steely professional cynicism from top-ranking Admiral Tuwey (a curmudgeonly Fred Ward), when confronted with the illicit manoeuvrings of certain Naval personnel, also rings grittily true.
On the other hand, Stig and Bobby's veneer of indestructible jokiness doesn't crack even when they're hung upside down and savagely beaten with a baseball bat (they suffer no broken ribs or even mild bruising), while playfully wounding each other with gunfire is presented as all of a piece with their buddy-bonding formula.
Thus the flick is neither fish nor fowl, but you can switch your brain to "Idle" and let it wash over you in an amorally titillating sort of way. What's really intriguing is the way that Denzel Washington has accrued an aura of smirking sleaziness in his middle years, as if he really could be that scary cop from Training Day a few years down the line. I doubt he'll get an Oscar for this one though.
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