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Pecs and violence: Sean Penn's muscles are a sight to behold in his new thriller - but its clichéd storyline is feeble. BRIAN VINER reviews The Gunman

By Brian Viner, Film Critic for the Daily Mail

Published: 20:20 EST, 19 March 2015 | Updated: 04:43 EST, 20 March 2015

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The Gunman (15)

Verdict: Cliched thriller

Rating:

By the time you get to the end of The Gunman, a thriller-by-numbers unsuccessfully disguised as something more profound, it comes as a mild surprise not to find Sean Penn’s torso given its own closing credit.

The 54-year-old — who, not insignificantly, was the project’s co-producer and co-writer, as well as its leading man — misses no opportunity to show off his taut, gleaming musculature, wearing short-sleeved shirts when his character absolutely has to, but otherwise going topless whether the story demands it or not.

He conducts all post-coital conversations sitting up in bed, enjoys vigorous showers, and at one point even strides hunkily out of the ocean with a surfboard under his arm, for which, unenlightened by the narrative, we are left to find our own explanation.

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By the time you get to the end of The Gunman, a thriller-by-numbers unsuccessfully disguised as something more, it comes as a mild surprise not to find Sean Penn’s (pictured) torso given its own credit

My theory is a dreadful mistake in the cutting-room, where maybe someone accidentally spliced in a deodorant commercial.

On the other hand, the director is Pierre Morel, who helped to reboot Liam Neeson, then 56, as an action hero in the 2008 film Taken.

Morel, a fifty-something man himself, clearly prefers not to see advancing middle-age as any kind of obstacle to abseiling down buildings or, as in Penn’s case in The Gunman, riding giant waves and limbo-ing under trip wires.

For entirely personal reasons, I salute him.

Penn plays Jim Terrier, who at the start of the film is a mercenary operating in the Congo, with sweaty, shadowy associates Felix (an unusually hammy Javier Bardem) and Cox (Mark Rylance).

A brilliant sniper, he is ordered to assassinate the Congolese mining minister, which plunges the country into civil war.

Official trailer for 'The Gunman' starring Sean Penn

He then has to leave, sharpish, scarcely giving him time to put his shirt on, let alone say goodbye to his sexy girlfriend Annie (Jasmine Trinca). Eight years later, Jim is back in Africa trying to appease his pained conscience by working for a charity.

But when armed men arrive to kill him, he wants to know who’s put a contract on his head, so hot-foots it to London, where he teams up with a former colleague, an enduringly tough, slightly raddled, greasy-haired geezer called Stanley (played almost inevitably by the geezer-in-chief, Ray Winstone).

He continues to Barcelona, where his old mucker Felix is now a bloated capitalist married to his ex-girlfriend Annie — though none too happily, judging by the speed with which she helps Jim to take his shirt off, again.

Apart from the killers on his tail, Jim must also grapple with another challenge; he keeps suffering nasty headaches and blurred vision brought on not by watching overly loud thrillers, but by post-concussion syndrome.

Of course, this doesn’t deter him from blowing up, stabbing, shooting and in a variety of other ways terminating the villains, leading to an unlikely denouement with the principal baddie at a bullfight, where Morel’s camera sensibly avoids large piles of ‘toro’ ordure.

If there’s any moral or message to take away, it’s that even a disrobed, headache-prone Penn is mightier than the sword — and everything else the bad guys try to kill him with

They might have provided an irresistible metaphor for the story, into which the ever-reliable Idris Elba also steps, all too fleetingly, as an Interpol officer.

Mind you, that’s not to say that The Gunman isn’t watchable. It is. With or without his top on, Penn is a charismatic presence, and there are some lively action scenes.

It’s also good to see Rylance on the big screen, so soon after his compellingly enigmatic turn on the small one, as Thomas Cromwell in BBC1’s Wolf Hall.

But I read an interview with Rylance this week in which he implied that The Gunman has big things to say about corrupt corporations exploiting natural resources in Africa.

It doesn’t.

It’s not a morality play, just a standard, rather violent thriller with a decent cast and exotic locations.

If there’s any moral or message to take away, it’s that even a disrobed, headache-prone Penn is mightier than the sword — and everything else the bad guys try to kill him with.

Insurgent (15)

Verdict: Sci-fi sequel

Rating:

Insurgent is the sequel to last year’s box-office hit Divergent, and set, as fans of Veronica Roth’s trilogy of best-selling science fiction novels will know, in post-apocalyptic Chicago, where the population is divided into five different factions, according to personality.

This time, in what is again a kind of caffeine-light Hunger Games, Tris (Shailene Woodley) must evade the clutches of the dastardly Jeanine (Kate Winslet), who needs her to open a mysterious box which nobody else has the power to unlock.

Winslet looks the part, basically playing Jeanine as a younger, more glamorous, and craftier Hillary Clinton

I suppose Roth had her reasons for so prosaically naming her villainess Jeanine, but it lends a slight air of Mallory Towers to the proceedings.

Still, Winslet at least looks the part, basically playing Jeanine as a younger, more glamorous, and (even) craftier Hillary Clinton.

Woodley, meanwhile, once more rises to the unspoken challenge of matching Jennifer Lawrence’s Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games; she is never less than convincing as a young woman on whom the whole of this dystopian society depends.

Theo James is excellent, too, as her collaborator and lover, the factionless leader Four.

And there is a welcome role for the always-luminous Naomi Watts as Four’s estranged mother, Evelyn.

Shailene Woodley in action-packed trailer for Insurgent

Director Robert Schwentke (The Time Traveller’s Wife) keeps a sure hand on the tiller, making the utmost of CGI effects (especially in a memorable scene in which Tris is wired up to electrodes and forced into an alarming hallucination).

But in the end, with its dysfunctional families and dynastic ambitions, there’s a soapy quality to the story that neither the sci-fi setting, nor the technological bells and whistles required to evoke it, can conceal: it might be a decaffeinated Hunger Games but it’s also Coronation Street on steroids.

The next film in the series is to be called Allegiant. But Detergent would work, too