For this film, the enormously buff Sean Penn gets his shirt off in a very big way. It’s called The Gunman but it should be called The Shirtoffman. Penn, 54, is the star, co-producer and co-writer; getting the shirt off is his prerogative. That shirt comes off when he showers, gets changed … any and every pretext. The pecs are revealed and I could hear the ghost of Frankie Howerd in the cinema auditorium: “Ooh, put them away, Sean.” There’s one scene in Africa where we get to check out the physique while he goes surfing (no body double), after which Sean jogs athletically back to the aid workers’ compound in his swimming gear.
Penn’s gym-bunny loveliness is the most attractively toned part of the film. Everything else is out of condition. The script is flabby and the direction has eaten all the pies. It’s based on an 80s thriller and there is something Freddie-Forsythian about this tale of tough mercenaries in the Congo who find that someone is after them for the bad stuff they did. Penn plays a guy who had to whack a Congolese politician and a decade later faces blowback; he contacts his old buddies for help, including Mark Rylance, Javier Bardem and Ray Winstone. Their collective testosteroney star power gives this some wattage. But that gun of Sean’s goes off with a whimper.
