2 Guns

NBC

Let's face it. The concept of two polar-opposite lawmen working together is no stranger to the big screen. First was Lethal Weapon, then came Rush Hour, and we've seen a few others along the way. Now, we have 2 Guns. It's entertaining, no doubt. But it only has some of the elements that make a buddy-cop action-comedy a hit. 

DEA Agent Bobby Trench (Denzel Washington) and Navy Officer "Stig" Stigman (Mark Wahlberg) are both set up by their respective department superiors to steal drug money hidden in a bank as undercover thieves. Both, however, are initially unaware that they both work for the U.S. Government, each seeing the other as a crook. To top it all off, they find out that the money they stole was not actually money from one drug kingpin but percentages from local drug lords who use the bank as a depository to pay off the CIA for silence. Bobby and Stig spend the rest of the movie trying to cut their ties with the money, clear their names, and, in the most captivating and entertaining way possible, bring all the bad guys (there are a lot of them in this movie) down.

It's no surprise that two-time Academy Award-winner Denzel Washington and Academy Award-nominee Mark Wahlberg are able to light up the screen with their brilliant chemistry. Watching these two talented actors stand in front of the camera and do what they were born to do made for a fun hour and forty-five minutes. Although their characters didn't set aside their differences and start working together until around an hour into the movie, when they were together it proved to be worth the wait.

2 Guns is good summer entertainment, but it's not worth sacrificing time or money that you may not readily have available. My biggest complaint is that the plot suffered. That's disappointing, especially after the Lethal Weapon movies and Rush Hour proved how essential the plot is to this type of movie (Disagree? Compare Rush Hour with its sequel). Furthermore, there was a strong presence of the theme of hierarchal corruption that wasn't as fleshed out as it should've been. But of course, Marky Mark and Denzel carried the movie all by themselves, and when their guns were blazing in the final shootout, I was enjoying every minute.

So, no, 2 Guns doesn't rank as highly as Rush Hour or Lethal Weapon in my eyes. But on an uneventful summer afternoon, it's really not a bad way to spend $9. There was a clever sense of comedy that the movie carried throughout its entire runtime, and the action scenes and the two leads took care of the rest.

Rating: 3/5