The Gunman

If you ever wanted to see a two-time Oscar winner sculpted entirely out of beef jerky and moral superiority, The Gunman is your film. I watched this one on a Tuesday night while trying to figure out if my air conditioner was making a "ghost noise" or just dying, and the sound of Sean Penn punching a mercenary in a London hallway actually helped me identify the rattle. It’s that kind of movie—loud, physical, and weirdly preoccupied with the sound of metal hitting bone.

By 2015, the "Geriatric Action" subgenre—pioneered by Liam Neeson in Taken—was already starting to show some gray hairs. Director Pierre Morel, the man who actually gave Neeson his "particular set of skills," tried to catch lightning in a bottle a second time with Sean Penn. But where Neeson brought a tired, everyman exhaustion to the screen, Penn brings a level of intensity that suggests he’s been training for the apocalypse by eating nothing but raw kale and spite. He plays Jim Terrier, an ex-special forces assassin who, eight years after a job in the Congo, is haunted by PTSD and trying to make amends by digging wells. Naturally, his past comes knocking with a suppressed handgun.

The Taken Blueprint (With Extra Biceps)

The problem with The Gunman isn't the action; it’s the tone. It wants to be a gritty political thriller about the exploitation of Africa, but it also wants to be a vehicle for Sean Penn’s fitness goals. Sean Penn spends so much time shirtless and glistening that I half-expected a Gold’s Gym sponsorship credit to roll. I’m all for physical commitment, but at a certain point, the movie feels more concerned with Penn's triceps than the geopolitics of mining rights.

The plot follows a standard "burned spy" trajectory. After an assassination attempt at his well-digging site, Jim flies to London and Barcelona to find out who sold him out. This leads him back to Annie (Jasmine Trinca), the woman he left behind, and Felix (Javier Bardem), the man who won her in his absence. Javier Bardem is operating on a completely different frequency than everyone else—he’s playing a jealous, oily businessman with a drinking problem, and he looks like he’s having the time of his life being absolutely miserable.

A Cast That Deserved More

Looking back at this film through a contemporary lens, the cast is genuinely staggering. You have Mark Rylance—one of the greatest stage actors of all time—playing a corporate villain with a smile that doesn't reach his eyes. You have Ray Winstone being the quintessential "loyal old mate" in London, and even Idris Elba pops up for a cup of coffee toward the end as an Interpol agent. It’s the kind of lineup that should have resulted in a modern classic, but the screenplay, co-written by Penn himself, has the subtlety of a lead pipe to the kneecap.

There’s a strange dissonance here that was common in the mid-2010s. We were moving away from the "invincible superhero" trope and toward "vulnerable but lethal" protagonists. Jim Terrier suffers from "brain trauma" that causes dizzy spells and blurry vision at the most inconvenient times. While this adds a layer of tension to the gunfights, it often feels like a cheap way to nerf a character who otherwise handles a sniper rifle like he’s playing a video game on Easy mode.

Why It Vanished Into the Bargain Bin

Despite a $40 million budget and a stacked deck of talent, The Gunman tanked. It earned back barely a quarter of its cost. Part of that was bad timing—the "Old Man with a Gun" fatigue was setting in. But the bigger issue was its self-seriousness. It’s hard to enjoy a popcorn flick when the film is constantly pausing to lecture you on the ethical failures of Western corporations in the Congo. It’s a "message movie" that keeps getting interrupted by explosions.

The trivia behind the scenes is just as melancholic. This was based on the French noir novel The Prone Shooter by Jean-Patrick Manchette, a book known for its cold, nihilistic distance. Penn reportedly pushed for more "heroic" beats and the political altruism angle, which arguably stripped the story of its lean, mean soul. The production also faced hurdles filming across several countries, and you can see every cent of that $40 million on screen—the cinematography by Flavio Martínez Labiano is crisp, and the locations feel lived-in rather than like soundstages.

The action choreography is actually quite good. Morel knows how to stage a fight in a confined space. A climax set at a Spanish bullfighting arena is particularly well-constructed, playing with the parallels between the sport and Jim’s own struggle for survival. There’s a weight to the hits and a clarity to the shootouts that many modern, CGI-heavy blockbusters lack. If you can ignore the clunky dialogue, the technical craft is undeniable.

The Gunman is a fascinating relic of a specific moment in action cinema when A-list prestige actors thought they all needed their own John Wick or Taken. It’s not a "bad" movie so much as it is a confused one—torn between being a high-brow political drama and a low-brow brawler. It’s the kind of film you find on a streaming service at 1:00 AM and find yourself finishing because the actors are just too good to look away from, even when the script fails them.

In an era where streaming has flattened out the "mid-budget thriller," there’s something almost quaint about seeing a movie this expensive and earnest fail so spectacularly. It’s worth a watch for Bardem's eccentricities and the solid practical stunt work, but don't expect it to change your worldview. Sometimes a movie is just a movie, and sometimes Sean Penn is just really, really fit.