I’ll say this about Baltasar Kormakur‘s 2 Guns (Universal, 8.2), the Denzel Washington-Mark Wahlberg drive-around and shoot-’em-up popcorn flick. It’s a lot more engaging — looser, funnier, more entertaining — than last year’s Contraband, which Kormakur directed (and which also starred Wahlberg). It’s basically a silly late-summer jagoff that’s about Washington and Wahlberg playing “catch” with each other — i.e., the old chemistry-rapport-mutual backscratch put-on/goof-off thing. Call it “attitude-surfing.”

There’s not an ounce of real-world credibility in any of 2 Guns, and that’s the point, I think. There’s one really funny line delivered by Wahlberg (which had to have been written after the casting of Edward James Olmos as a Mexican drug kingpin) that I laughed out loud at. For that one instant, for me, the movie came alive. There’s also a pronounced homage to Don Siegel‘s Charley Varrick (’73) that I found highly amusing (and which I mentioned to Marshall Fine after the screening).

I don’t know how much of 2 Guns was improvised by Washington-Wahlberg and how much of it was written on the page, but respect to screenwriter Blake Masters for at least writing a fair amount of the dialogue. I can tell you that the plot, based on the same-titled graphic wank by Steven Grant, is absolute bullshit. The movie has no undercurrent, no themes — nothing except the wank-off vibe of everyone just making the damn thing and collecting their paychecks and taking their dicks out and stroking them as they cash their checks and hack around between takes.

Denzel was really well paid, Wahlberg was really well paid…why can’t I be be like them as I sit there watching this thing? Better paid, I mean. At least that.

I have to go uptown for a lunch thing so that’s the end of this riff, but I’ll add to it sometime later this afternoon.