Those Who Wish Me Dead

 2021, d. Taylor Sheridan - crave

I listen to enough film review podcasts and read enough written reviews to know that there's definite superhero fatigue going on in the critical community.  There's also a rising lament for the old school action-thriller, which they say has been supplanted by the superhero or franchise tentpoles and the plot-thin ultra-violence ballets.  Is there room left for the mid-budget action-thriller anymore?

Of course there is. They've never gone away, but the studios have not been positioning them with the same emphasis since the whole chase for a "shared universe" to emulate Marvel's success.  

The problem isn't the superhero films have taken over, more that TV has.  The same quality of action-thriller can be sustained on a multi-episode TV-series or mini-series as what was once available in theatres.  You can't really get the same massive budget sci-fi, superhero or fantasy spectacle on TV with the same level of refinement or star power, which is why they get all the attention.  The masses now mainly want to go to the theatre only for spectacle, anything else can wait for streaming or home release.  And with the streaming wars taking place, the services are trying to boost their subscriberships with fresh content streaming-first, meaning a lot of the mid-budget movies which would fill the gap between the big things and the indies you don't have to leave the couch for.

Something like Those Who Wish Me Dead, starring Angelina Jolie, with John Berenthal, Aiden Gillen and Nicholas Hoult, would once have been a 80 to 100 million grosser at the box office, based primarily on star power, but an enticing trailer attached (which it has) helps as well.  The trailer posits Jolie as a forest ranger that must help a boy escape gun-toting assassins whilst a wildfire rages, threatening them all.

It's a very straightforward story the trailer is trying to sell, but the film itself is built in layers, striving to tell a more human tale, rather than just a conventional action-thriller story, with limited success. 

Jolie's Hannah is not a ranger at all, but a "smokejumper", part of a Montana forest firefighting crew.  She's suffering PTSD after battling a forest fire that turned tragic, and has become a little self-destructive.  She's positioned in a watchtower for the season, a role she's not very happy about.

Her ex-boyfriend, and Deputy Sheriff, Ethan (Berenthal), is concerned about her self-destructive behavior, but trying not to be too sucked in given that his wife is very pregnant and obviously has other concerns.

Meanwhile Ethan's ex-brother-in-law, a forensic accountant, has realized that by "doing the right thing" he's put himself and his son, Connor (Finn Little), in jeopardy after the district attorney's house explodes (a "gas leak" the news reports).  They go on the run with a thumb drive full of files and about 10K in cash, headed for Ethan's survival camp.

The assassins (Gillen and Hoult) are very good at their jobs, and with relative ease hack the account's computer and discern where they are going. They have plenty of resources that allow them to get ahead of them, and they're very tenacious, stopping at nothing, including setting fire to Montana, to get them.

These roads do collide, but not altogether.  Though Ethan is Connor's family, they only get a little bit of time together, and it's not much of a reunion.  Ethan spends most of his time with Hannah, and the two, having experienced a lot of trauma, forge a bond.  

I'm not sure what it is about Jolie, but she gives off natural maternal instinct vibes, even when she's trying to play put upon or detached from the pre-teen she's stuck with (it's likely because she has so many children of her own).  Surprisingly, I found Jolie's presence in the film to be a lot lighter than I expected.  The screentime splits itself between four different threads in the first act, and is still divided in two in the final.  As such it doesn't feel as star-driven a vehicle as it probably should.

Little, for his part, does a good job at being understated and looking traumatized.  He's not acting up a storm, he just seems in the moment.  Gillen and Hoult, both having played some of the greatest assholes on TV in recent years (in Game of Thrones and The Great, respectively), are both disgustingly perfect in their roles as hitmen.  The kind of workaday attitude they have about their job, the nonchalance means they've been at it a while and it doesn't excite them much, and having to chase after the kid seems like just a nuisance to them. They're also not playing broadly villainous, more of simmering sinister... it works quite well.  Berenthal is dependably stoic but just when you think "he's got to have some ex-marine training, and be a hardened war vet", you see the fear in his eyes and that he has no alternatives.  He's not playing an action hero, just a man.  Medina Senghore plays his wife Allison, and has drawn the unfortunate straw of playing pregnant in the role... but she runs a survivalist retreat so the woman can do some shit...again, just like Jolie and Berenthal, we just want a little more big screen heroism out of her too.

There's a good deal of tension building in the film, and some exciting/harrowing moments that are well executed.  The vistas of New Mexico-as-Montana are gorgeous, and the fire set-pieces which had to be digital look really, quite good (the lighting department deserves some applause).  But I don't think the film pulls together all that well.  It works quite nicely in many disparate pieces but as a whole it feels like it's still in a rough draft state, that the edges need to be sanded down to get the pieces to fit together.

It also rests in a state of melancholy, which I found quite honest for the story the movie was telling, but I understand that many will find it dissatisfying.

That the film doesn't solely focus on Jolie's Hannah, that it doesn't stitch its threads together neatly, that it tries to be too cerebral and emotional, it all seems to imply that Sheridan was trying to outsmart the genre his film is playing in when he really didn't have to.  It's a pretty good watch, absolutely something that should appeal to those feeling superhero fatigue, but just doesn't elevate itself like I think it wants to.