13 Years Later, Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg’s Gritty Action Thriller Is a Streaming Hit

1 week ago 9

Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg in 2 Guns

Published Apr 4, 2026, 1:00 PM EDT

Chris is a Senior News Writer for Collider. He can be found in an IMAX screen, with his eyes watering and his ears bleeding for his own pleasure. He joined the news team in 2022 and accidentally fell upwards into a senior position despite his best efforts.

For reasons unknown, he enjoys analyzing box office receipts, giant sharks, and has become known as the go-to man for all things Bosch, Mission: Impossible and Christopher Nolan in Collider's news division. Recently, he found himself yeehawing along to the Dutton saga on the Yellowstone Ranch.

He is proficient in sarcasm, wit, Photoshop and working unfeasibly long hours. Amongst his passions sit the likes of the history of the Walt Disney Company, the construction of theme parks, steam trains and binge-watching Gilmore Girls with a coffee that is just hot enough to scald him.

His obsession with the Apple TV+ series Silo is the subject of mockery within the Senior News channel, where his feelings about Taylor Sheridan's work are enough to make his fellow writers roll their eyes.

There’s something very comforting about a scrappy action movie that knows exactly what it is. 2 Guns has that energy in spades. It’s messy, funny, violent, and powered almost entirely by the chemistry between Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg. That kind of movie tends to age well on streaming, and Starz viewers are proving it.

The movie has popped into Starz’s chart mix in the U.S., giving the 2013 thriller a nice late-career streaming bump. That’s not hard to understand. Plenty of people missed it the first time, and even more are probably just happy to revisit an action movie from the era when this sort of star-driven studio programmer was everywhere. The cast includes Washington as Bobby Trench and Wahlberg as Marcus Stigman. Together, they turn 2 Guns into the kind of movie you can put on halfway through and still end up finishing. That’s classic sleeper-hit behavior, and Starz is reaping the benefits now.

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Is '2 Guns' Worth Watching?

Collider’s review stated that 2 Guns works best when it simply lets Washington and Wahlberg play off each other. Their chemistry gives the movie most of its energy, and the early scenes are easily the strongest because they focus on the two leads trading jokes, lying to each other, and setting up the bank robbery at the center of the story. For a while, it feels like the movie might be a sharp, funny action ride.

"[Baltasar] Kormakur's movie is always looking for a shortcut even though it has a straight shot with the strength of its two lead stars. It doesn't need a gratuitous shot of Paula Patton's breasts or Paxton's character repeating a tough-guy monologue about how to effectively play Russian roulette, especially when one of the guys he's interrogating has absolutely no reason to stay quiet. These kinds of moments are staples of the genre, but in the case of this film they never hold anything together. They're scattered about like ineffective markers that rarely guide us to anything more than a reminder about the genre we're watching as if the guns and explosions weren't a tip off. In place of an honest, brawny action flick, 2 Guns is all glamor muscles."

2 Guns is streaming now.