This tale of international intrigue, for lack of a better term, begins in 2006 in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Jack Terrier (Penn) is a former Special Forces soldier working as a security advisor for a mining company. With a small group of associates, he moonlights doing the kind of shadowy covert jobs that corporations will pay big money to have done off the books. His latest mission finds him assassinating the country's powerful minister of mining. When the deed is done, Terrier is forced to flee the country, leaving behind his far nobler aid worker girlfriend Annie (Jasmine Trinca) behind without a world of explanation, as civil war breaks out throughout the land as the result of his actions. Eight years later, a newly ennobled Terrier has returned to the Congo to legitimately help the locals by digging wells for an NGO in between officially verboten surfing jaunts. When he is attacked by three thugs who have been sent to kill him—and to bring back 50 cc's of genetic proof of his demise—he begins to surmise that his long-buried past has come back to haunt him and then some.
After the ambush, Terrier flies to London to begin investigating who might want him dead by looking up his former comrades to see if they might have any information. While a couple are dead and one, Stanley (Ray Winstone), is content to drink his days away, others have prospered—Cox (Mark Rylance) is now a top executive at the company that contracted them for that fateful job and Felix (Javier Bardem) is not only a high-powered Barcelona-based businessman with vague notions of corporate philanthropy, he is also now Annie's husband. From there, the action shifts to Spain and Gibraltar as Terrier dodges any number of setups and shootouts in order to uncover the truth leading to a climactic game of cat-and-mouse set amidst a bullfight in Barcelona—odd, since Barcelona officially banned the sport as of 2012. If all off that wasn't complicated enough, Terrier is also suffering from brain trauma resulting from his former life that currently affects his memory and which threatens to incapacitate him further if he doesn't stop the derring-do and take it easy.
Based on the 1981 pulp novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette with the admittedly awesome title of "The Prone Gunman," "The Gunman" is, at least for the first two-thirds, rudimentary beyond belief. The action scenes are executed by director Pierre Morel with none of the grace and style that he brought to the big set-pieces in such previous efforts as "District B13" and "Taken." Unlike those beautifully orchestrated ballets of brutality, the fights here have the lets-get-this-done feel of a television series that has fallen a day or two behind in its shooting schedule. To fill in the blanks between the shootings, stabbings and beatings, co-writers Penn, Don MacPherson and Pete Travis offer up a boilerplate narrative in which the motivations and actions of all the key characters can pretty much be figured out within the first couple of reels, leading to an unavoidable sense of dramatic wheel-spinning, and the occasional attempts at adding a sense of political awareness to what is otherwise an unabashedly pulpy storyline are more off-putting than engrossing.
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