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2 Guns hits its target

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This new buddy cop movie starring Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg delivers much  more than you’d expect from this familiar genre.

Washington plays Robert “Bobby” Trench, an undercover Drug Enforcement Agency agent, while Wahlberg is undercover naval intelligence officer Michael “Stig” Stigman. Problem is, neither knows the other is an agent, assuming instead they are the criminals they’re impersonating.

Trench has been tasked with bringing down a Mexican drug cartel, and Stig is his sharp-shooting, wise-cracking muscle. All plans go awry when Trench’s snitch ends up inside a bowling bag – well, his head at least – and the Mexican drug lord pays for forged passports in cash instead of cocaine.

Trench has been working on this case for over 12 months, and so to salvage the operation, he agrees to Stig’s suggestion that they rob a Mexican bank where the drug lord supposedly has $3 million stashed to smoke him out.

It’s about here that things get twisty. A series of hitches sees both Trench and Stig on their own, outside of the law, with only each other to rely and the baddies in hot pursuit.

The main problem with this movie is that all the promos give away one of the biggest plot twists – that Trench and Stig are undercover agents. So when the movie makes a big deal out of this revelation, it’s not a big deal at all, and it should have been.

Still, this is an excellent piece of entertainment with an abundance of plot twists and plenty of bad guys to run from to keep up the momentum. Car chases, shootouts and blowing things up are par for the course in this genre, but they’re not overdone or gratuitous. Washington and Wahlberg’s characters have great chemistry, and Wahlberg’s smart-arsed one-liners add comedy.

This is a fun action caper with a decent storyline, really bad bad-guys, heroes you root for and some scary-looking bulls. You’ll know what to expect for the first third of the movie, but it is one of the better buddy cop flicks to be released in a long time.

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