Photo: Clay Enos/Sony Pictures
It can be difficult to find a through-line in Mark Wahlberg’s career. He has been a serious actor. He has been a comedy star. He has been an action hero. (He has then been an action hero again and again.) He has asked you to say hello to your mother for him. In a way, we’ll still always think of him as Vince from Entourage. But what ties it all together? His buddies!
Wahlberg almost always has a friend, or a partner, or a sidekick, or an antagonist for whom he eventually ends up with a begrudging respect. He almost never is the solo lead in a movie, and even when he is, it’s usually in a Peter Berg flick, in which he is really just a supporting character to an oil-rig explosion or a marathon…
