Movie Review: Those Who Wish Me Dead

Those Who Wish Me Dead is three action films for the price of one, but the forest-fire ultimate survivor narrative quickly stretches the width of an ocean with the depth of a puddle.

There were high hopes for Those Who Wish Me Dead, the latest piece of work from writer-director Taylor Sheridan, but the ingredients for his previous success – the beautifully converging narratives of Hell or High Water, and Wind River, the methodical, restrained writing of Sicario, and even the fluid action of Without Remorse – are left overcooked.

The film begins with Connor Casserly (Finn Little) and his father, Jack (Jake Weber), a man we quickly learn is involved in the most midnight-black shade of black-market information trading and on the run from some even shadier sharp-suit gangsters.

We then meet Hannah Faber (Angelina Jolie), a veteran smokejumper who has been tortured by inner turmoil and survivor guilt, and chases adrenaline-junkie experiences to avoid addressing it, much to the chagrin of local sheriff, Ethan Sawyer (Jon Bernthal) and amusement of his pregnant, most-badass-woman-on-the-planet wife, Allison (Medina Senghore).

Chasing Connor, and tangling themselves in the Jolie-Bernthal-Senghore web, is the comically grim father-son hitman duo, Jack and Patrick Blackwell (Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult), who spend their time together murdering people with extreme efficiency while discovering which one of them might have a fragment of humanity remaining.

So, the ingredients are all still there; a tragic parental story, Jolie doing her best Ellen Ripley impression circa 1986, the local sheriff’s badass wife vs the world, and two hitmen who are so obsessive-compulsive about doing a good job that they probably breathe 15% better than the normal human.

Perhaps it’s that these pieces need to all complement and function together, with each element harmonious instead of brutally jarring and ungraceful. The film has a solid character in Jolie, who plays the aloof-but-broken and indifferent-but-guiding lead, but these other narratives, the young boy and his emotional drama, the two hitmen, and particularly the sheriff’s wife, all make her role feel inconsequential and stalled.

Instead, it’s hard not to feel like we’re really watching three separate stories all find their own conclusions independently around Hannah’s character, and without sharing a common vision beyond just ending with the last scene in the longest story and happening to cross paths with each other.

This lack of excitement as the film enters its second half falls largely to the performance chemistry of Jolie and Little, where the younger lead also fails to carry the required weight of his role. While it’s never fair to tear apart the performance of child actors, it’s certainly viable to direct that criticism to the person responsible for force-feeding them so many lines and suffocating them under acute emotional trauma for 100 minutes.

The main issue is that the performance, and the continued agony at the loss of a parent, is too authentically real, and too agonising to repeatedly pile under glibly cool dialogue from others. It’s mostly jarring because it brings the exhaustion of that trauma with it as well, with both of the film’s primary characters weighing the film down with a strange combination of emotional and unemotional distress.

The main-event forest fire arrives a little late to the screen, and seems more to serve the foundational flag-raising and awareness for smokejumpers in the film than it is to terrify or inspire dread for our many heroes. This is only a problem for Jolie, whose character is forced to cycle through about four different stages of processing guilt in five minutes to endure it.

As you’d imagine from the filmography and general aesthetic of the creator, Those Who Wish Me Dead is exquisitely beautiful in both sound and cinematography. While the lingering shots offer little in the way of genuine character insight, what they choose to linger on is portrayed magnificently, with scenic mountains and forest gorgeously splashed across many of the scenes.

This holds up the film’s dive into modern nihilism, revolving around the grim reality of fires, PTSD and loss of life without also stressing the joys of life that make those events bearable or survivable.

Instead, Those Who Wish Me Dead forces its focus on pensive realism over the farcical absurdism that could’ve placed it alongside Fargo or No Country For Old Men, and we watch everyone struggle externally and internally for 100 minutes with very little genuine connection to make it worthwhile, making the film less of a neo-western thriller and more like a global documentary of the past 12 months.

Director: Taylor Sheridan
Starring: Angelina Jolie, Nicholas Hoult, Finn Little, Aidan Gillen, Medina Senghore, Tyler Perry, Jake Weber, Jon Bernthal

Oxford Lamoureaux