Those Who Wish Me Dead, review: Angelina Jolie fails to ignite in this oddly 1990s thriller
Dir: Taylor Sheridan. Cast: Angelina Jolie, Finn Little, Nicholas Hoult, Aidan Gillen, Jon Bernthal, Medina Senghore, Jake Weber, Tyler Perry. 15 cert, 100 min
It’s no one’s fault that a whole wodge of forthcoming films, shot before the pandemic, may come out looking a trifle dated. Still, Those Who Wish Me Dead doesn’t have much of an excuse for feeling like it might have been made in 1998. Billed as a “survival thriller” and starring a weirdly underutilised Angelina Jolie, this is a musty amalgam of fire-fighting action flick, John-Grisham-esque conspiracy hokum and outdoorsy bonding adventure. All it lacks is a web search using Ask Jeeves.
Jolie, as ever, is the oddest aspect of her film. She has nothing to do with the plot, which involves a pair of hired killers (Nicholas Hoult and Aidan Gillen) coming after a whistleblowing accountant (Jake Weber) in the Montanan wilderness. They successfully kill him, but his teenage son Connor (Finn Little) gets away with something crucial on a scrap of paper, and runs off into the mountains.
Meanwhile, Jolie’s Hannah Faber hangs around in a watchtower, suffering from PTSD. She’s a smokejumper, employed to parachute down into wildfires and put them out, but her last mission went awry when three boys of Connor’s age got trapped in an inferno, and Hannah’s team made a wrong call about the wind direction. For no particular reason, we kill some time with this boorish gang at the start, who are hardly more pleasant than the main villains. There are also earnest domestic scenes with Connor’s sheriff uncle (a stolid Jon Bernthal), who knows Hannah, and his heavily pregnant wife (Medina Senghore).
Partly adapted by Michael Koryta from his (alleged) suspense novel of the same name, the movie is co-written and directed by Taylor Sheridan, the screenwriter of Sicario and Hell or High Water. Its problems begin and end with the script, while the middle is frittered away by his utterly impersonal direction. While Sheridan cross-cuts listlessly between seven characters, his second unit swoops around a forest landscape that’s bound to be ignited sooner or later. When Gillen’s character flings a couple of flares into the brush to set up a distraction, the effects guys brace for an overcooked finale.
Sheridan’s fondness for dead-cool dialogue tips into parody when Tyler Perry shows up for a single scene, as some corrupt official authorising a cover-up: press a button on this guy’s back, and he’ll come out with “it’s a zero-sum game, treat it as one” or “we were promised absolutes”. The film’s nadir, though, is the scene in which Hoult threatens Senghore’s prone, pregnant black woman with a red-hot poker to the face. Sheridan tried to address misogynistic violence seriously in his (very average) Wind River, but here it’s used simply to bait the audience and up the ante.
The 1990s-ness of proceedings needn’t have doomed this, of course: with sparkier execution and better characters, it could have been Jolie’s answer to Cliffhanger, say, with a chaser of The Client. Her heroine never comes through in any such way – she’s a cipher who shows up completely by accident to look after Connor in the wild, and doesn’t even interact with the bad guys face-to-face until the last 10 minutes. Until then, she’s just doing surrogate mother duties, racing through random lightning fields, and gaining nasty injuries that conveniently preclude any Tomb Raider-esque heroics.
The boy puts in a credibly distressed performance, for which Sheridan deserves some credit. The infinitely more experienced Gillen and Hoult are meant to be playing father and son, but they lack what you might call “assassin chemistry”: each seems adrift in a separate film, neither thriving. Sheridan does get one big, accidental laugh when two of his cast members, in the morning light with smoke clearing, appear holding hands and covered head-to-toe in the finest ash Hollywood’s props artists can buy. Our mounting disbelief – never really banished from one cloddish scene to the next – gets this one outlet to blow sky-high.
In cinemas from Monday
