THE CONTRACTOR
Cert 15 ★★★ On Amazon Prime now
Chris Pine and Ben Foster were brilliant as bank-robbing brothers in 2016’s Hell Or High Water – but they come up against a far less interesting script here.
A monumental flop after a wide release in US cinemas, this predictable espionage flick should go down far better as a freebie for Amazon Prime’s UK subscribers.
Pine plays James Harper, a “Green Beret” Special Forces war hero who is discharged from duty and stripped of his pension when medics discover he’s been taking a cocktail of painkillers to cover up a dicky leg.
Unable to provide for his wife Brianne (Gillian Jacobs) and young son (Sander Thomas), Harper asks his old army buddy Mike (Ben Foster) to introduce him to private military contractor Rusty Jennings (Kiefer Sutherland). The Canadian actor gives Rusty a manic grin and a sinister growl so we fear the worst when he offers the pair a huge payout for what he claims will be a very easy job in Berlin.
A Syrian virologist Salim Mohsin (Fares Fares) is believed to be preparing a chemical weapon in a lab, financed by a charity with reported links to al-qaeda.
As the surveillance of Moshin and his potential extraction hasn’t been sanctioned by the German government, the gig will be strictly off the books.
The gritty set-up is as familiar as the film’s title (a very popular name for straight-to-video action flicks) and it’s no surprise that it all goes dramatically wrong in Germany.
It’s basically Bourne all over again as the double-crossed Harper sets out to uncover a shadowy conspiracy.