From Mile 22 to The Union, Mark Wahlberg has made some of the best action movies of his career in the past decade. In the years since he left hip-hop behind to become an A-list movie star, Wahlberg has headlined all kinds of films. He first broke out as a leading man with his turn as an up-and-coming porno actor in Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling ensemble drama Boogie Nights. He gave a scene-stealing comedic turn in Martin Scorsese’s crime thriller The Departed. He shared the screen with a talking teddy bear in Seth MacFarlane’s Ted movies.
But the genre that Wahlberg keeps coming back to is action. In the past decade, he finally got his long-gestating Uncharted movie off the ground, which had been in development for so long that Wahlberg aged out of the role of Nathan Drake and had to play Sully instead. He turned shocking real-life events into compelling thrillers with Deepwater Horizon and Patriots Day. Since 2015, Wahlberg has starred in some awesome action movies.
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The Union
In 2024, Wahlberg shared the screen with Halle Berry in the Netflix action comedy The Union. Wahlberg plays a blue-collar construction worker and Berry plays his high school sweetheart who unexpectedly reappears in his life. She’s now a secret agent working for a covert government organization called “The Union.” As they get swept up in a dangerous conspiracy, they rekindle their long-forgotten relationship.
Wahlberg and Berry’s spectacular on-screen chemistry elevates The Union above a standard straight-to-Netflix actioner. They bring humor and romantic tension to the action set-pieces. This delightful blend of action and romance is reminiscent of movies like True Lies and Romancing the Stone.
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Mile 22
Wahlberg collaborated with director Peter Berg for the fourth time to star in the high-octane action thriller Mile 22. The plot revolves around a top-secret CIA elite squad tasked with transporting a high-profile target — a renegade police officer — to an extraction point 22 miles away, all while being hunted by government forces. Wahlberg leads a star-studded cast that also includes John Malkovich, Ronda Rousey, The Raid’s Iko Uwais, and The Walking Dead’s Lauren Cohan.
Berg knows how to craft a chaotic action sequence, and Mile 22’s all-action, no-frills story is full of them. It doesn’t leave much room for nuance, but it’s a non-stop thrill-ride. Wahlberg is a charismatic hero as always, but Mile 22 also makes great use of Uwais, not only giving him plenty of well-choreographed fight scenes to chew on, but also allowing him the space to give the finest dramatic performance of his career.
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Uncharted
Naughty Dog’s Uncharted series revolutionized blockbuster gaming in the late 2000s. The Uncharted games gave players the feeling of living through a pulpy action-adventure movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark, swinging through jungle ruins and running and gunning their way through ancient temples. 15 years after Uncharted allowed gamers to experience the perspective of an action hero on the big screen, the franchise actually came to the big screen in the form of a movie adaptation.
Tom Holland stars as Nathan Drake opposite Wahlberg as his mentor Sully. The movie goes back to Nate’s origin story and explains how he got hooked up with Sully and became a notorious treasure hunter. It plays like a greatest-hits montage of all the biggest action set-pieces from the games — including the iconic cargo plane sequence from Uncharted 3.
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Patriots Day
Before they collaborated on a fictional story in Mile 22, Berg and Wahlberg told a true story in Patriots Day. Based on the non-fiction book Boston Strong by Casey Sherman and Dave Wedge, Patriots Day chronicles the city-wide manhunt for the terrorists who carried out the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing. Patriots Day tells that story as a pulse-pounding thriller without veering into exploitation and losing sight of the real-life horrors it’s depicting.
Boston is Wahlberg’s hometown, and he’s always been proud of his Bostonian heritage, so it felt appropriate for him to portray one of the city’s worst tragedies on the big screen. Rather than focusing on the devastation of the bombing itself, Patriots Day focuses on how the city came together to catch the terrorists responsible. The film is a poignant tribute to the heroes who dealt with the aftermath of an American tragedy.
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Deepwater Horizon
Patriots Day wasn’t the only thriller based on true events that Berg and Wahlberg released in 2016. They also made Deepwater Horizon, about the explosion of an offshore drilling unit and the ensuing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. The film takes the perspective of the oil rig workers who experienced the terror of the explosion and the intensity of the fire firsthand. Wahlberg plays the chief electronics technician alongside Kurt Russell as the offshore installation manager.
Deepwater Horizon is both a thrilling depiction of an explosion in the middle of the ocean and a righteous polemic against the woeful mismanagement of BP. The film eventually gets around to the complicated legal proceedings that followed, but before that, it takes plenty of time to capture the panic and mayhem of the explosion. It’s uncommonly serious for a Mark Wahlberg action movie, but just as gripping as usual.
