MINE
Director: Fabio Guaglione, Fabio Resinaro
Written by: Fabio Guaglione, Fabio Resinaro
Cast: Armie Hammer, Tom Cullen, Annabelle Wallis, Juliet Aubrey, Geoff Bell, Clint Dyer
Opens: April 7, 2017
The movies are a perfect medium for the projection of war stories. That’s a no-brainer. Arguably the most exciting recent feature in that area, Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper,” gave Bradley Cooper a wide ensemble of players for him to re-enact the key months in Chris Kyle’s record-breaking career in picking off the enemy. If you’re going to make a sniper film that is largely a one-man show, you’d better have a script with some originality and a performer who rivets attention. Fabio Guaglione and Fabio Resinaro have the good luck of featuring Armie Hammer in the principal role of a desert sniper. Hammer, the great-grandson of oil tycoon Armand Hammer, has all-American good looks, his 6’5” frame having enjoyed a breakthrough in the role of Cameron Vinklevoss based on his court battles with Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network.” But the screenplay is not up to the challenge, featuring some flashbacks to the sniper’s tumultuous home life and a hackneyed partnership with a more talkative fellow with whom he is paired in “Mine.”
Fabio Guaglione and Fabio Resinaro shoot their first full-length feature film on Fuerteventura in Spain’s Canary Islands to stand in for a battleground in a desert somewhere in North Africa. Mike (Armie Hammer) is on a mission with his marine buddy Tommy (Tom Cullen) to take out a high-level target, but while Tommy is all gung-ho for following orders to the letter, Mike questions whether a wedding convoy is the ideal location for taking shots—at the father of the bride. In the film’s most exciting minutes—that is, after some good-ol’-boys chit-chat mainly from motor-mouth Tommy—they escape from a convoy of men who had discovered them, but they are too far from base camp to return easily. Noting an old, rusty sign warning of mines in the area, Tommy shrugs the warning off as a bluff by the enemy. Mike takes a step, hears a click and recalls how he is just one step from being blown sky-high. He must remain stationary like a penguin on an Arctic egg while advised by radio to hold out for fifty-two hours for help from the base. How the convoy would be able to rescue him in this precarious situation is beyond my pay grade.
As he stands, slowly going mad, the sun turning his face ruddy and vision clouded by violent sand storms, he believes he has a conversation with a Berber (Clint Dyer), able to speak basic English, who asks him why he is in the desert, why he in a war, and why he doesn’t move. “Gotta keep moving” he cryptically states, later sending his seven-year-old daughter (Inés Piñar Mille) to the soldier with a canteen of water. That the girl died in infancy seven years ago is another story.
As his mind deteriorates, his only action being the firing at night at wild desert dogs, he thinks back to his childhood, and this is where the film goes wholly into cliché. He recalls his father (Geoff Bell), a violent drunk who knocks out Mike’s mom (Juliet Aubrey), how his dad then throws a punch at him, how he punches out a fellow who is harassing a waitress in a bar, and years later the shaky relationship with his fiancée Jenny (Annabelle Wallis), who has left him a surprise message on his cell.
While the script is strictly cornball, credit photographer Sergi Vilanova Claudin with filming the wide desert vistas and Andrea Bonini who supplies the appropriate soundtrack. For a far better movie of the sort, take another look at “No Man’s Land,” Danis Tanovic’s Oscar-winning pic set during the fighting in Bosnia and Herzogovina.
Unrated. 107 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Comments, readers? Agree? Disagree? Why?
Story – D
Acting – B-
Technical – B
Overall – C+
