There is a sharper film hiding inside Panama, and it is the one Mark Neveldine keeps cutting away from. The premise hands the production a genuine historical event — a superpower about to roll into a sovereign country — and the movie treats it as wallpaper behind a routine gunrunning errand. That is the central problem, and no amount of motion disguises it.

Cole Hauser plays James Becker, a grieving ex-marine pulled out of retirement by a defense contractor named Stark, played by Mel Gibson in a handful of scenes that work as marquee value more than character. Becker’s job looks simple on paper: fly south, broker an arms deal, ask no questions. The questions arrive regardless, because the country he lands in is weeks away from a full American invasion.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_FWx79_GNs

A director fighting his own material

Neveldine built his name on the Crank pictures, where the restlessness was the joke and the engine. Here the same instinct works against the story. Quick cuts, smash zooms and a soundtrack that never stops nudging the viewer toward an excitement the scenes have not earned. The effect is exhausting rather than propulsive, and it flattens the few moments that might have carried real tension.

‘Panama’ should be more fun (…) But it’s mostly a lot of manic editing.
Amy Nicholson, The New York Times

The Cast

Hauser, riding the success of Yellowstone, carries the picture with the weathered competence the role asks for, and he is the most watchable thing in it. Gibson does what late-period Gibson does in these contractor-financed thrillers: he lends his face to the poster, plays a few scenes with easy authority and lets the marquee do the rest. Around them, the local fixers, the love interest and the cartel-adjacent heavies arrive as types lifted from a 1980s video shelf rather than people with anything at stake.

Mel Gibson at the premiere of “We Were Soldiers,” Mann’s Village Theater, Westwood. Depositphotos

[It] is the sort of instantly disposable action-thriller that wears its cynicism on its sleeve while laboring to grab attention with quick-cut visuals.
Joe Leydon, Variety

A real invasion, only glanced at

The 1989 invasion of Panama was not a minor footnote. President George H. W. Bush sent more than twenty thousand troops to depose Manuel Noriega in an operation that reshaped the isthmus and the United States’ posture in the region. For a film that puts that machinery in its title and its third act, Panama is strikingly incurious about it. The politics are set dressing, and the moral lesson Becker keeps promising never lands because the movie will not slow down long enough to mean it.

The verdict

And yet it is not unwatchable. The action beats are staged with enough competence to fill ninety-five minutes, and a leaner, nastier thriller is buried somewhere in here that a more patient filmmaker might have found. As released, Panama is a missed opportunity dressed up as a busy one — proof that a real subject is worth nothing if a film is too restless to look at it.