YMMV / Mile 22

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Silva, of course. Is he a full-on Jerkass with little redeeming qualities and would fully qualify as the villain had he not been a law-abiding official, or is he simply doing his job and isn't even aware of his attitude?
  • Li Noor. Did he help save Alice in the apartment building because he'd grown fond of her, or did he wanted to save her so he could kill her himself later and twist the knife on Silva even more? The answer to this question is quite relevant because it could make all the difference on whether Alice survived the movie or not.
  • Anatole Kuragin. What was his line "you're making a mistake" supposed to mean? Was it just a petty threat, as in "my mother is going to kill all of you after you kill me"? Or maybe he was trying to say the FSB's apparent terrorist activities were actually some kind of cover mission with much nobler goals, maybe catching some real terrorists? If the latter is true, the entire movie would be an extreme case of Poor Communication Kills.
• Complete Monster: Axel is the Indocarrian agent in charge of catching Li Noor. When Overwatch is escaping with Noor, Axel blows up one of their trucks, killing several agents. When Overwatch hides in a cafe, Axel blows it up, killing all of the civilians inside, including a little girl. Axel later executes agent Douglas when he makes a stand against Axel's agents. In the following fight, Axel's men nearly kill agent Alice and a little girl. Despite his friendly persona, Axel is continuously shown to not care who he has to hurt to get the job done.
• Designated Hero: Silva is obnoxious, petty and has a tendency to bully his teammates ruthlessly at different points in the film. This makes it oddly satisfying when Noor and the Russians take him down a peg when they slaughter Overwatch thanks to him. It doesn't help that his supposed intelligence is very much an Informed Ability.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Li Noor, for having arguably the best action scenes in the movie and for Iko Uwais' spot-on performance both as an actor and as a fight choreographer. The fact he's the real Big Bad of the movie also helps.
• Fight Scene Failure: Even if he kept all the stardom for himself, Uwais's choreography is pretty amazing - if only we could see it as something more than a succession of blurs.
• Fridge Brilliance: The leader of Overwatch having the codename Bishop instead of something more self-explanatory like King may seem random. However, the English word bishop originated from the Greek word episkopos, which is composed of the subwords epi- meaning over (as in above) and skopos which in turn originated from the verb skopein meaning to watch. In other words, Bishop = Overwatch.
• He Really Can Act: Most critics agreed that Uwais's performance as the surprisingly subtle, complex Li Noor was the best thing in the film. It has also been called his best one to date.
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • A decent amount of viewers will admit to watching this movie primarily for Iko Uwais, best known for The Raid and its sequel.
  • A lot of people also admit to watching it for CL.
• Magnificent Bastard: Li Noor is a Deep Cover Agent from Indocarr working on the behalf of Russia. Through meditative training and careful memorization of a cover story, Li Noor fools a polygraph and offers information on caches of cesium along with a disc drive that only he can open, refusing to give the password until he is in safe hands before taking out a team of assassins while Chained to a Bed. As US task force Overwatch is dogged by Indocarr agents on the way to a safe airstrip, Li Noor helps James Silva's team evade the agents, sticking his neck out to help them multiple times. Once on a safe plane, Li Noor reveals that the whole operation was a trap for the Russian government to locate Overwatch's computer crew and decimate them for Silva's execution of a Russian General's son earlier in the film, proving himself indispensable to every faction he works for.
• Narm: The fictional country standing in for Indonesia being named "Indocarr." It's no wonder some dubs opted to delete it entirely from the dialogue and replace it with "this country" and other indirect mentions.
• The Scrappy: Silva, for being an unrepentant Jerkass who may as well be the villain of the piece. Mark Wahlberg's overly aggressive performance doesn't help.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: This film manages to gather Iko Uwais from The Raid, Ronda Rousey from Ultimate Fighting Championship and Lateef Crowder from many films, but only Uwais has the chance to show his fighting abilities in plenty. His duel against Crowder is so short that it counts more as a cameo for the latter, while Rousey has literally only one hand-to-hand move in the entire film and it is not against any of them.