If Quentin Tarantino were to drunkenly scrawl a rough outline for a movie on a bar napkin, toss it into the trash after deciding to go another direction, and then another writer came along to fish it out for a screenplay of his own, something like 2 Guns would be the result.
There’s all the violence, drug deals, and colorfully drawn characters you’d find in a Tarantino script like True Romance, but without the gloriously fluid dialogue. Meaning it’s significantly less fun than it’d like to be.
Based on a graphic novel, 2 Guns stars Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg as an undercover DEA agent and an undercover U.S. Navy intelligence officer. Each believes the other to be a criminal who’s helping him infiltrate a Mexican drug cartel. They team up to rob a bank full of the cartel’s money, the legitimate reasons for which were never clear.
Then, to an absurd degree, there are double-crosses on top of double-crosses, and it’s only the charming screen personas of Washington and Wahlberg who keep the madness grounded enough to ensure that it’s a slight bit of fun. Bill Paxton’s turn as a creepy villain seems to be out of an entirely different (possibly better) movie altogether.
2 Guns has no patience for clever planning by our heroes, preferring brute force to accomplish its objectives. So it comes as no surprise when what looks to be a climactic (literally Mexican) standoff quickly devolves into a nonsensical firefight. Without Tarantino to script it, they probably couldn’t come up with any other ideas.
