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THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD
Director: Taylor Sheridan Cast: Angelina Jolie, Jon Bernthal, Finn Little, Nicholas Hoult, Aidan Gillen, Medina Senghore, Jake Webber, Tyler Perry, Tory Kittles, James Jordan MPAA
Rating: Running Time: 1:40 Release Date: 5/14/21 (wide; HBO Max) |
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Review by Mark Dujsik | May 13, 2021 The screenplay for Those Who Wish Me Dead feels like the outline for a story filled with much more potential. Screenwriters Michael Koryta (upon whose novel the movie is based), Charles Leavitt, and director Taylor Sheridan don't bother to fill in the gaps. This amounts to little more than a chase story, as two sociopathic assassins (whose cruelty and intelligence diminish as required by the plot) hunt for a man, who knows something or other that the killers' boss doesn't want to go public, and the man's son, who knows as little as we do about what the father knows—although the killers don't know or care about that. Elsewhere in this story is a traumatized firefighter, who failed a trio of kids during a wildfire and hasn't come to terms with the tragedy, as well as a Sheriff's deputy, who is related to the pursued by marriage and could be their last hope for survival. The cop does run a survival camp, after all. The broad strokes of this story, which mainly have to do with the constantly on-the-move plot, are mostly sound, but the screenplay more or less ends with those strokes. We can sense Sheridan's touch in some of the script's more plainly spoken but stylized dialogue, as well as the staging of its occasionally brutal action. Such little nuggets of cleverness and tension aren't enough to carry what feels like a draft, brought to the screen a bit too early. The story begins with the firefighter, a career smokejumper in Montana named Hannah (Angelina Jolie), who battles wildfires after parachuting into the blaze. A nightmare provides her back story: a fire that got out of control and three kids trapped amidst the flames, beyond her reach. Hannah has since become depressed to the point of almost being self-destructive. She tries to hide it, drinking and laughing with her fellow firefighters, but local Sheriff's deputy Ethan (Jon Bernthal), who once dated her, can see what she was trying to do when opening up a parachute on the back of a speeding pickup truck. Meanwhile in Florida, Jack (Aidan Gillen) and Patrick (Nicholas Hoult) murder a district attorney and his family, making it look like an accident. The news reaches a man named Casserly (Jake Weber), who starts seeing people staring at him while driving his son Connor (Finn Little, in a rather impressive performance) to school. The father decides it isn't safe here, so he starts the long drive with his son to reach his brother-in-law Ethan in the middle of nowhere out West. There's an admirable simplicity to the concerns of the plot itself, which offers little information about what Casserly knows (something to do with accounting), what it means (something illegal), or why the two killers, hired by a be-suited tough guy played by Tyler Perry, want the man and his son dead. The script doesn't stop to explain such unimportant details, because it knows it doesn't need to. It doesn't stop, unfortunately, for much of anything else, either. The father and son are on the run. Hannah is re-assigned to a fire tower in the middle of the forest, where she will spend a lot of time alone with her guilt-ridden thoughts (This seems like an error in bureaucratic judgment, especially when Hannah "jokes" to the deputy that she might jump from the tall structure). Ethan has some brief but sweet moments with his pregnant wife Allison (Medina Senghore), and almost immediately, the two killers ambush Casserly and Connor (There's a no-nonsense way to these assassins that makes them a particular kind of threat, although at least one of them oddly grows an inkling of a conscience when the plot necessitates it). The kid escapes and encounters Hannah, who promises to protect him. When she reads a letter from the father describing what he found and who is after his son, Hannah decides she and Connor need to get to a more secure location with a lot more help. It's all a lengthy chase, punctuated by moments of menace, violence, and natural threats (The killers set fire to the woods, which almost seems like a footnote in the story until the climax). There are some smart scenes here, such as when Ethan tests the waters with the killers, trying to determine if he's a dead man now or if he possesses some leverage with them. The script also possesses some seemingly pointless bits of action, such as when Hannah and Connor have to race through an open field during a lightning storm (only to double-back all the way to where they started, making the entire expedition seem useless), and an increasing number of standoffs/fights, in which at least one of the participants loses most or all understanding of their surroundings, their opponents, or what the stakes are (The assassins in particular become dumbed down from their earlier, cruelly calculating ways). If the movie took some time to breathe with these characters, such gaps in logic might not have mattered as much. Instead, Those Who Wish Me Dead leaves one with the overall feeling that the story is constantly rushing toward a series of confrontations with man and nature, making room for little else of more significance. Copyright © 2021 by Mark Dujsik. All rights reserved. |
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(for
strong violence, and language throughout)
