Those Who Wish Me Dead
Oscar Winner Angelina Jolie along
with writer and Director Taylor Sheridan of “Sicario, Hell or High Water, Wind
River and Paramount Network’s Yellowstone” fame, combined their talents to lead
a tight ensemble cast in Sheridan’s latest action thriller set in the beautiful
wild wooded vista high country of Montana titled “Those Who Wish Me Dead”.
PLOT: Early
we see the lead character “Hannah” (Jolie). She is a solitary emotionally
withdrawn smoke jumper who is apparently still reeling from the loss of three
lives in a flash fire in her not too distant past. And while she is personable,
warm and feminine on a gaunt frame she has no problem hanging tough through the many typical male flirtations and jocular
banter from the men in her jumper unit. It is also very clear that even when she is smiling there is desperate pain and a fracture in her smile. It’s not too certainly
clear early on what has put such a deep hole in her, you just accept
it. She is genuinely tormented by something devastating, which explains why
she does not sleep – why she does not eat – why she does not say much.
Quickly the story transports from the upper north west to all the way across country to the southern warm tropical climate of Florida where we find a middle age forensic
accountant going about his morning routine. He is a loving widowed father raising his mop haired precocious preteen
son. There is nothing out of the ordinary about their day as we see both father and son enjoying their breakfast
together before the father drops his son off to school. But somewhere between their conversational bites there is a sudden breaking news story developing on the father’s lap top PC. changing the previous mild demeanor in the room dramatically in an instant. Literally
dropping everything the father and son frantically flee in their car, but not to the son’s school, bur rather to a destination much further north in Montana There is a personal connection there and there is an urgency to get his son there to be safe before its too late. The father knows and we the views can see and know; there are killers coming after them and if they don't leave now they will die along with the father's secret..
REVIEW: “Those
Who Wish Me Dead” is not Sheridan’s’ best work, but it has a confident muscularity
to its tale that made the film’s basic plot overall work very efficient for
me. It stays its entire 1:40 running time in a very testosterone laden lane
with tight compact directorial precision, all the while immersed in smartly executed
high octane action, some punctuated appropriate violence, crisp snappy dialog
and a verbal and visual leanness that makes the film very easy to follow, devoid
of any intricate or confusing twists and turns. Its premise is clear up front .……….”Keep moving, keep the big secret hidden or
you die”.
There is not much of a typical emotional rhythmic
subplot in this film either to play clever tricks on our
minds or be absorbed by. At its core this effort is a stripped down bare bones executed
story not leaving much time for viewer’s to assess the plausibility of any of
its sometime disjointed scenes to making total perfect connected sense. While most of characters in the film do elicit and and emotes some decent measure of empathy and sympathy to their plights there is not much of it to really make you really viscerally care about their wellbeing or be intrigued by with the one exception of a pregnant
wife who definitely holds her own as an interesting twist in the film.
The father and son assassins
played very effectively by Nicholas Hoult ( Mad Max Fury Road) as “Patrick
Blackwell” and Aidan Gillen (Peaky
Binders) as “Jack Blackwell”, come across less as some run of the mill killers
we have seen many times before in other films. Instead they come across more like two Harvard
graduates driven by a calculated focused ruthlessness similar to two Arnold Schwarzenegger like Cyborg Terminators only with real flesh and blood running through their veins.
They move and talk with great clarity but with a minimum use of words. Their physical striding movements also seem to always have some specific purpose.in mind. Nothing they do is a wasteful. Their focus and body language lets you know up front this is their chose professional line of work and they are not part of any one’s F-ing around crew. When they point their guns at
something……………something is going to die.
You can see pretty much early
on how this story will end. The only question is just how much realistic forest
fires and human violence hell we have to endure just to get us there. So when the finale
does arrive there is no wow moment as was in the fabulous Sicario. Rather it just gets
us there with our cinematic bellies pretty much filled but not quite fully satisfied.
Entertained but not enthralled. Plausible but not totally captivated by it, even after all of the energetic dramatic effort that was put into making this movie meal.
Finally, Jolie besides wearing
an atrocious wig was just adequate as “Hannah” and that’s about it. She seemed
out of place for the entire film from the beginning as I kept thinking Charlize
Theron would have been more suited here. But it’s not so much her fault as Sheridan appears
to not put much substantive dialogue meat on her character bones – figurately and
literally. She projects less as a credible convincing fire fighter and more
like a woman who was assigned to work by a temp agency at a fire watch tower in the wilderness just
for one day to so some emails and answer the phones. Throughout her "Hannah" came across as someone who was just trying to make the best out of a really bad day that involved her fighting for her life with two machine minded aggressive assassins and a monstrous fire rapidly rampaging on her ass. She definitely should have called in sick that day.
Overall “Those Who Wish Me
Dead looks great, has great pace and a solid evenness in its execution. What
was missing was a grounded subplot and more story development to tie all of its loose ends that Taylor Sheridan
either accidently or deliberately left out of his story. Or maybe he just got a little lazy and felt his bare
lean approach with some appropriated scene stealing from his more successful
efforts (and there were many) like Sicario, Hell or High Water and Wind River
would all collectively be enough to bring this colorful film effort to a dramatic memorable conclusion.
It does work, just not memorably.
3.25 Stars
