The Gunman: A typical action flick with a few timeless principles

The Gunman aims for viewers who enjoy ricocheting bullets, exploding IEDs, and kick-’em-stick-’em knife fights.

The year is 2006, and Jim Terrier (a super-muscular Sean Penn) works by day as a security contractor for an international mining company bleeding Congo dry of its precious metals. By night, he and a small team of assassins led by Felix (Javier Bardem) turn their bleeding arts on people. After a hit on Congo’s minister of mines, Jim flees Africa, leaving his girlfriend, Annie (Jasmine Trinca), in Felix’s care.

Eight years later, a career of violent misdeeds has worn Jim down, but he’s trying to get his life back on track. He returns to the Congo to dig wells for an NGO. After surviving an attempt on his life, he learns two of his old gunmates were not so fortunate. Jim must find out who wants him dead: A government? His former employer? His search—spanning Africa, England, and finally Spain—is complicated by the discovery Felix and Annie are married. The hunter has become the hunted, and he must save his own hide while protecting his married ex-girlfriend.

Jim’s inner turmoil over his past sins manifests only in headaches and blackouts. Surely, the director (or screenwriter) could’ve trusted Sean Penn, a two-time Oscar winner, to confront Jim’s demons in more than a strictly physiological way. And Felix’s frequent drunkenness leashes Javier Bardem, himself a winner of five Goyas (Spain’s Oscars), to a one-dimensional character.

But The Gunman (rated R for strong violence, language, and some sexuality) is not without some value, reinforcing a pair of timeless principles: Don’t do unto others what they might hire a squad of Uzi-wielding thugs to do unto you. And unless you’ve earned the silky red pajamas, don’t get cornered in a bullring by a half-ton hunk of hoppin’ mad hamburger-n-horns.