Those Who Wish Me Dead: Smokin’ Action, Wobbly Plot, With Angelina As Child-Saving Firefighter

By Liam Lacey

Rating: B-

Raging forest fires, lightning strikes, and fusillades of bullets can’t defeat Angelina Jolie, who plays a badass parachuting firefighter or “smoke jumper” protecting a child from ruthless killers in the Montana wilderness in Those Who Wish Me Dead.

The film was adapted from Michael Koryta’s 2014 novel by Taylor Sheridan, an actor turned writer/director who has built an admirable reputation in the contemporary Western crime genre, as a director (Wind River), and his Oscar-nominated screenplay for Hell or High Water (2016) and the two Sicario films.

Here, the writing credits are shared between Sheridan, author Koryta, and Charles Leavitt, a committee approach resulting in incoherent overkill, if you’re foolish enough to think about it. Fortunately, thanks to the film’s spectacular wide-screen aerial views and taut action scenes (not to forget Jolie’s fascinating face smudged in ash and tears), thinking is not the film’s priority.

Early scenes follow parallel action in Montana and Florida. In Montana, Jolie plays Hannah, a firefighter stationed in an observation tower, a solitary penance for an early incident, seen in post-traumatic flashbacks, where she misjudged the wind direction during a conflagration, causing the death of three kids.

Now she lives as a beer-drinking one-of-the-guys gal, where she runs into regular trouble with her ex, the local sheriff, Ethan (Jon Bernthal). While the two have some lingering chemistry, Ethan is gratefully married to the pregnant Alison (Medina Senghore), who runs a local survival school for kids, and is a resourceful defender of the family nest.

The assassination team, played by a couple of over-qualified non-Americans, first appears in Florida. Irish actor Aidan Gillen (The Wire) as Jack, the tactical veteran sociopath, and English actor Nicholas Hoult (About a Boy), the less calloused rookie, Patrick. They first appear as city utility officials who show up at a Fort Lauderdale home, ostensibly to inspect a gas leak, and leave the occupants’ bloody corpses buried in the house’s rubble.

PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN

The killers head to Jacksonville, where widowed forensic accountant Owen (Jack Weber) sees the news report of the exploding house as he prepares breakfast for his 12-year-old son, Connor (Finn Little). As he watches the TV footage, Owen immediately knows that he’s the next target of the killers and takes off on a rode trip to his brother-in-law Ethan’s house in Montana.

Owen and Connor almost get there, but so do the hitmen who, in a roadside ambush, riddle the car with bullets. Connor manages to escape into the woods, carrying a letter his father has instructed him to take to the news media.

One skepticism-inducing oddity of this supposedly crack assassin team: they’re spectacularly bad at keeping a low profile. In one scene, Madea star Tyler Perry pops up in the middle of Montana as their boss, dressed in a black suit and driving a big dark SUV. He’s only there to warn the killers that this is “zero-sum” game, where the boy can’t be spared. One can’t help thinking a call on a burner phone might have been more prudent.

Later, after Jack and Patrick dress up in dark suits as fake FBI agents complete with badges, Jack announces that anyone who sees their faces must be eliminated. When Patrick points out that killing a lot of people in a small community may attract attention, Jack responds by setting the woods — and apparently most of Montana — on fire as a “diversion.”

Back in the woods, Hannah’s watch tower is knocked out of commission by a lightning strike, so she sets out toward the town to get help. On the way, she notices the boy, Connor, off in the woods, watching her.

After a brief chase, she confronts him and wins his trust. Together, they brave a run through an open field during a violent lightening storm. By the climactic nighttime sequence, they themselves caught between the raging firestorm and the trigger-happy killers. And, yes, there is violence: In the last quarter of this film, every character on screen has a limp, gaping wound, or a half-barbecued face.

There’s more than an echo here of The Client, the 1993 John Grisham adaptation which saw Susan Sarandon playing a maternal role to Brad Refro’s 11-year-old Mafia witness. But the surrogate mother-child bond barely develops here, as Hannah and Connor leap from one near-death experience to the next in this relatively brisk 100-minute film.

Rather than a mom, Jolie is something closer to the boy’s action heroine fantasy girlfriend, someone who can rock a parachute outfit or swing a fire axe with equal style.

Those Who Wish Me Dead. Directed by Taylor Sheridan. Written by Michael Koryta, Charles Leavitt and Taylor Sheridan, based on the book by Michael Koryta. Starring Angelina Jolie, Nicholas Hoult, Aidan Gullen, Jack Weber, Medina Senghore, Jon Bernthal, and Tyler Perry. Available in select theatres and on VOD beginning May 14.