Jolie fights fire with fire in action thriller
The Angelina Jolie raging-inferno/raging-assassins mashup “Those Who Wish Me Dead” is stuck with a title (from Michael Koryta’s 2014 novel) daring you to recall it correctly the next day, and much of director Taylor Sheridan’s follow-up to the 2013 “Wind River” is like that: in one eye, out the other. But it’s a diverting enough one-eyed watch, even as it strains to get its story established and moving. And there’s one surefire “YEAH!!! GET HIM !!!! ” bit of violence, which happens not to belong to Jolie, but to the film’s essential supporting ringer, Medina Senghore.
That bit won’t play the same way at home as in a reasonably well-attended theater. But it’s your choice, which is exactly how the studios want it and the theater owners don’t: The film opens simultaneously in theaters and streams on HBO Max starting May 14.
Remember Meryl Streep in “The River Wild”? This is “The Fire Wild.” Somewhere in Montana’s high country (portrayed by New Mexico), two relentless killers and brothers played by Aiden Gillen and Nicholas Hoult are on the trail of 12-year-old murder witness, a Florida boy played extremely well by Finn Little. (He’s terrific at crying a little, not a lot, strategically.) The boy eludes an assassination attempt, but the other passenger in the car fleeing Florida for Montana isn’t as lucky.
The boy’s forensic accountant father (Jake Weber) has uncovered incriminating evidence against some important politicians and their underworld associates. This evidence winds up on a Florida district attorney’s desk, we’re told. The killers retaliate by blowing up the DA’s house and then tracking father and son out West, where the accountant’s small-town Montana sheriff brother (Jon Bernthal) and sisterin-law (Senghore) live, surrounded by forest. On cryptic orders from Mr. Big (Tyler Perry in a one-scene puzzler of a cameo), these deadly, gabby hit men eventually arrive for lethal questioning.
The novel, quite different in plot outline, has been reworked rather awkwardly by director Sheridan and cowriters Koryta and Charles Leavitt. “Those Who Wish Me Dead” remains vague about the corruption at the root of the bloodletting. In the early going, the film crosscuts from that plotline to the introduction of Jolie’s character, U.S. Forest Service firefighter Hannah Faber. She’s haunted by memories of a tragic fire that took the lives of three boys she couldn’t save. “I read the wind wrong,” she says, in a way indicating she may never forgive herself. Potential forgiveness arrives in the form of that imperiled 12-year-old on the run.
In her first action showcase since “Salt” 11 years ago, Jolie does it all with panache: breaking out the mother-bear feral intensity, palling around with her fellow “smokejumpers,” even at one odd, self-conscious point deflecting speculation about the actress’s weight (I’m not
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“skinny,” Hannah corrects the boy at one point — “I’m lean”). The banter often collides abruptly with the brutality in “Those Who Wish Me Dead.” At one point Sheridan has the highly pregnant character played by Senghore thrown and kicked around her home, then threatened with a red-hot poker, and by that point the audience’s bloodlust demands retribution and a GET HIM!!! moment.
An actor turned filmmaker, Sheridan’s writing career got going big-time with his Oscar-nominated “Hell or High Water” screenplay, and many enjoyed “Wind River” as well. I loved the first and liked about half of the second, and 50% is my enjoyment setting
with “Those Who Wish Me Dead,” too. The editing rhythms are seriously jumpy, terrified of slowing down for even a second, and while the digital effects aren’t bad, they have a way of taking you out rather than further into the suspense. I’m not suggesting Jolie and company risk their lives running into actual wildfires, but there it is.
Most action movies depend on some whopping example of hypocrisy to deliver the goods ordered by the public. Here, Hannah’s emotional trauma and PTSD is taken seriously when the plot calls for it. On the other hand, the horrors witnessed first-hand by the boy, which begin early and end late in “Those Who
Wish Me Dead,” are more like character-builders, turning him into the young man he was meant to be: co-star of a Taylor Sheridan wilderness thriller. The movie spreads its suffering and heroics around more successfully than it entwines its narratives. But Jolie and Senghore save the day.
MPAA rating: R (for strong violence, and language throughout)
Running time: 1:40
Where to watch: Premieres May 14 in theaters and on HBO Max