Review: Those Who Wish Me Dead

Image courtesy of New Line Cinema.

Taylor Sheridan's "Those Who Wish Me Dead" feels like a long-lost 1990s action-thriller script that has been revived. While it's good to see Angelina Jolie headlining a film again, and the picture's action sequences - especially those involving a raging wildfire consuming wooded areas of the Pacific northwest - are well made, the film's characters could have used more development and the central storyline is vague and generic enough that it somewhat lowers the stakes.

In the film, Jolie plays Hannah, a smoke jumper - a type of specially trained wildland firefighter - and hard drinker who is haunted by a past incident in which she failed to save several children from a wildfire. She lives in a small town - where her ex-boyfriend, Ethan (Jon Bernthal), is a cop who lives with his very pregnant wife, Allison (Medina Senghore) - and spends her free time riding in the back of trucks and opening parachutes for a thrill.

Meanwhile, a young boy named Connor (Finn Little) is told by his father, Owen (Jake Weber), that the two of them must flee following a successful assassination by two murderous thugs - played by Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult - of a district attorney. Owen, who is some sort of accountant, apparently has some top-secret information that implicates a number of high profile people, including Congress members and governors. He tells Connor to get the information to a news station in the case of his death.

At one point, the two hitmen meet with a heavy played by Tyler Perry, who talks about bumping off Owen and Connor and refers to a "zero sum game." Unfortunately, we never find out what it is that Owen knows, and the conspiracy he has uncovered is only discussed in vague terms, thereby lessening any sense of urgency that the film is trying to create.

After the two killers catch up with Owen, Connor flees into the wild, where he bumps into Hannah, who - in need of some sort of redemption after her previous failed rescue - decides to help him. Ethan searches for the boy as well, and the two hitmen make an unpleasant visit to Ethan's home, where they rough up his pregnant wife, only to find that she's not so easy to ruffle.

The theory of Chekhov's gun is that if a gun is introduced in the first act of a play, it'll be fired by the end of it. All the talk of wildfires in the picture should be a clear indicator that by the picture's end, one will be raging out of control. And in the middle of it, Hannah, Connor, Ethan and Allison will face off against the killers played by Gillen and Hoult.

Those final scenes are among the film's most potent, and the sequences shot against the backdrop of the wildfire are impressively intense. But this is a film in which there's little character development or motivation established - Hannah is the only one with much of a backstory - and, as a result, "Those Who Wish Me Dead" plays out as a somewhat standard action thriller. That being said, it's well paced, it often looks great and the action scenes are exciting, so while it's far from perfect, it's also reasonably engaging. In terms of films currently playing at the multiplex or streaming, you could certainly do far worse.