There are very much two sides to Mark Wahlberg, and he’s deftly jumped between both to firmly establish himself as one of the biggest and highest-paid stars in Hollywood over the last two decades. There’s the action hero who features in a string of middling B-tier genre films that do solid if unspectacular business at the box office without faring too well with critics, and then there’s the Serious Actor and powerhouse producer.
Wahlberg is an underrated dramatic talent in the right project, picking up an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in The Departed, as well as landing a second Oscar nod for producing The Fighter, in which he also played the lead role. There’ve been a handful of times where he’s managed to straddle both sides of his screen persona, but the best example by far is his first collaboration with director Peter Berg in Lone Survivor.
The biographical war drama is a dramatized account of a Navy SEALs counter-insurgency mission gone horribly wrong, with Marcus Luttrell’s four-man team caught behind enemy lines while trying to track down a high-ranking Taliban official. Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch and Ben Foster play the central quartet, and when things go awry, Lone Survivor becomes a nail-biting exercise in tension and gripping action.
It was a solid critical and commercial success, earning over $150 million at the box office on a $45 million budget and winning largely positive reviews across the board, and it’s now finding a second life on streaming. Lone Survivor is currently one of the ten most-watched titles on Amazon Prime Video in the United States, and it comfortably ranks as one of Mark Wahlberg‘s very best efforts.