Mile 22 Review: 3 Ups & 6 Downs

Downs...

6. The Outrageously Awful Editing

Mile 22 may very well be the most haphazardly edited major action movie since the infamously incomprehensible Taken 3. With an abundance of shaky close-ups and rapid-fire cuts, Peter Berg is clearly trying to ape the gritty realism of the Bourne movies, a trend that largely died out a few years ago (with damn good reason).

Unfortunately Berg splices the otherwise entertaining action sequences into incoherent oblivion: it's hard to enjoy what's going on when you're not even fully aware of how characters relate to one another spatially.

Berg literally cuts five or six times per second during especially intense exchanges, and it's utterly infuriating. Even during the talkier scenes, he just can't keep things still, continually cutting despite the fact it's more of a distraction than a net benefit.

Considering that editor Colby Parker Jr. has worked with Berg in most of his prior movies with no problem whatsoever, we're going to lay the blame squarely at Berg here. He clearly didn't give Parker much to work with, and the end result is a spectacularly ugly production.