Last night Mark Wahlberg showed up on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and surprised the hell out of me by talking up the comedy of 2 Guns. Wahlberg had the biggest hit of his career last summer with Ted, and he was showing up on a comedian-friendly late night show, so the topic made sense, but nothing I had seen from 2 Guns suggested the slightest possibility of being funny. Now here comes this red-band trailer, via IGN, which actually backs Wahlberg up. I'm not seeing the "new" comedic face of Washington here, as Wahlberg promised, but there are at least jokes. Whether or not they're funny is for you to decide.
What this clip still doesn't answer, though, is how a movie coming out this Friday has managed to completely mask its identity from me, someone who really ought to have gleaned what a movie is about before it opens. The painfully generic posters and title promised pretty much nothing but the presence of Washington, Wahlberg, some guns and some cash, while the first trailer offered a few quips, but a lot more emphasis on, uh, guns and cash and fast cars. You can revisit that magic below:
So apparently this is much more of a Bad Boys kind of action movie, with quips coming as often as the insane action set pieces, and less like Contraband, the other movie that Wahlberg made with director Baltasar Kormakur. Truthfully, that sounds a whole lot better anyway. Wahlberg tried his hand not that long ago at Michael Bay-styled action comedy this spring with the surprisingly sharp Pain and Gain, and he's always been better as a slightly hopped-up funny crook than a grim-faced one (see, again, Contraband). If I'd realized that 2 Guns was actually aiming to be *funny*, and not just sprinkling in the kind of smug quips that usually pass for comedic relief in action movies, I might have stopped to look twice at those stupid posters by now.
Arriving this weekend with only The Smurfs 2 for wide-release competition, 2 Guns ought to be able to draw in every action aficionado who couldn't get on board with the slow-burn swordplay of The Wolverine. And now, apparently, anybody who really liked Wahlberg in Ted too. Given just how many people that is, 2 Guns is now looking a whole lot smarter than I gave it credit for.
