(Download 2 Guns) Mark Wahlberg seems to be losing his criminal edge. As a reluctant smuggler in last year’s Contraband,(2 Guns Download) he excelled at sneaking illegal goods into the Port of New Orleans right under the authorities’ noses. Re-teaming here with director Baltasar Kormákur, he now lacks any sense of intuition, instead playing one of two moles who can’t smell a rat to save their lives.

The rather implausible set-up is that Stig (Wahlberg), an undercover officer for Naval Intelligence, has teamed with undercover DEA agent Bobby (Denzel Washington) in a bid to ingratiate themselves to a Mexican cartel boss. Despite having worked together for a year and shared breakfasts of warmed-over Reservoir Dogs dialogue, each fully believes the other to be a hardened criminal.

(Download 2 Guns) Conversely, neither star convinces us this is anything more than an easy paycheck, with each coasting on charm and a knack for casually tossing around banter as if playing catch in the park.(Download 2 Guns Movie) After his strung-out turn in Flight, Washington seems content sunning himself and checking out the scenery (including Paula Patton in a demeaning role). Meanwhile, Wahlberg is poorly served by such a lackadaisical approach, as he’s traditionally excelled when either petulant (The Departed) or put upon (The Fighter).

Even when things inevitably go sideways, Clinton Shorter’s funky score assures us that everything is totally cool. It’s apparent his compositions are intended to instill a groove recalling Out of Sight. Alas, whereas Steven Soderbergh’s film had Elmore Leonard’s jazzy prose, 2 Guns has Blake Masters’ clunky script,(Watch 2 Guns Online) in which gratuitous explosions are the preferred form of punctuation.

(Download 2 Guns) Aggravatingly, Kormákur’s film hasn’t much patience with its own high-concept premise, opting to have Stig and Bobby abandon their ruses at the first available opportunity. At that point, the plot depends increasingly on the machinations of an uninspired rogues’ gallery, including James Marsden as a pissy, corrupt military officer and Bill Paxton as a sadistic Bill Paxton in a bolo tie.

Their introduction serves only to clutter the stage for a climax that unfolds with all the subtlety of a herd of bulls storming through a Mexican standoff. And please don’t mistake that for an analogy. As its title suggests, 2 Guns doesn’t go for such fanciful things.

“If it bends, it’s funny,” Alan Alda’s unctuous TV producer character in “Crimes and Misdemeanors” likes to observe. “If it breaks, it isn’t.” There’s a whole lot of breaking going on in “2 Guns,” a movie that uneasily mixes typical mismatched-buddy-cop jokiness with excessive violence that derails the enterprise.

(Download 2 Guns) Filmmakers like Quentin Tarantino and Shane Black, more often than not, know how to show just enough mayhem in just the right increments so that the laughs keep coming.

See video: '2 Guns' Red Band Trailer: There Are Far More Than 2 Guns

Director Baltasar Kormákur (“Contraband”), working from Blake Masters’ adaptation of Steven Grant’s graphic novel, lacks that precise touch. One minute we’re chuckling over the banter between the leads, and then someone gets tortured or shot in the kneecap and the comic tone evaporates.

That banter mostly works, however, since most of it goes back and forth between Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg.

(Download 2 Guns) As the film begins, we see Bobby (Washington) and Stig (Wahlberg) plotting to rob a small-town bank where drug kingpin Papi Greco (Edward James Olmos) makes a sizable weekly cash deposit.

Not to get too deeply into spoiler territory, neither Bobby’s nor Stig’s intentions wind up being what we originally thought. But while the two of them are scamming each other, they are in turn each betrayed by the people they thought they could trust, forcing them to band together as they become the target of the DEA, the CIA and the U.S. Navy, to say nothing of a very angry Papi.

(Download 2 Guns) Washington and Wahlberg make this fairly flimsy material far more fun than it should be. Among its many crimes, “2 Guns” is steeped in masculine panic, from the constant references to male genitalia and what characters plan to do with other people’s junk to Paula Patton getting saddled with perhaps the most gratuitous nude scene by a major actress since Halle Berry in “Swordfish.” (The camera actually starts on her breasts and moves its way up to her eyes, as though Kormákur was ordering a basket of wings from a Hooters waitress.)

The director does know his way around an elaborate set piece, whether it’s a car-chase-turned-fist-fight or the blowing up of a cafeteria kitchen, but it’s the more one-on-one moments of sadism that make the tone veer too sharply. He could have removed some wackiness and made a gritty action movie (Watch 2 Guns Online) (although, granted, that strategy served him none too well in “Contraband”) or toned down the viciousness and played this off for comedy, but as it is, “2 Guns” is neither fish nor fowl.

(Download 2 Guns) Still, an eclectic mix of actors (the cast also includes Bill Paxton, James Marsden and Fred Ward) got a paycheck, and the whole thing will probably play like a charm trimmed for content on TNT one of these days.