Those who want me dead9/23/2023 ![]() ![]() Sheridan’s writing (he shares a screenwriting credit with Koryta and Charles Leavitt) and the quicksand pull of his cast work well together. The pleasure, again, is in seeing it all play out, in simply seeing how these characters, all of them, go about the business of trying to survive each other. This last pair matters for a number of reasons, but most urgent is their background as the instructors for a survival school - as in, their background as people whose default is being prepared for the bullshit wizardry of the unexpected. Those Who Wish Me Dead is, in so many ways, a couples’ movie: father and son assassin, Jolie and her ward, and, last but hardly least, the local sheriff, played by Jon Bernthal, and the sheriff’s wife, played by Medina Senghore with a tenacity that damn well better earn her a lot more work. There’s a lot to be said for a reaction shot that wordlessly communicates deviations from the given. The tie between these two men - to say nothing of these men and their boss - is more intriguing than it has any right to be, not least because of the glints of interest Sheridan takes in how they react to each other. This comes in handy, in a movie in which those assassins (played, quite nicely, by Nicholas Hoult and Aidan Gillen) have, on top of leaving a body count behind them specked with the brain matter of innocents, start a fire when they get to Faber’s so-called neck of the woods. By the time that the young boy on the run, Connor (Finn Little), emerges into view, everything is in place to make you believe in Hannah Faber’s care, intelligence, and - most crucially - her life-preserving sense of authority. Something about Sheridan’s movie, however, and Jolie’s star power, makes it easy to imagine the calluses on her hands for the 90-ish minutes that our disbelief needs to be held aloft. Do I believe in Jolie as a smokejumper, flinging herself into fires for humanity’s sake? Well, no, but probably mostly because it’s usually hard to believe that veritable movie stars can be form-fitted to the role of any convincingly working-class hero. Faber failed her psych evaluation after “the incident” and is now relegated to a smokejumper version of desk duty, staked out in a watch tower in the forest so as to keep an eye on the goings-on out there, fires, storms and the like. Just look at its star, Angelina Jolie, who plays the trauma-ridden firefighter at the heart of the movie, Hannah Faber: a tough woman who can and does hang with the boys and is a little rowdy - but never to the point of losing her composure, except when acting on an apparent death wish. But the melodrama of it all - which knowingly veers into somewhat corny terrain on occasion - feels appreciably larger than life, in the way that good fiction should. Sheridan’s sense of drama isn’t entirely grounded the relationships are. Fire - devastating, pure, easy to romanticize, hard to control - is the central axis of this movie, and it holds a heavy symbolic power in this movie, to say nothing of the very real, incredibly grounded dangers it poses. And right alongside it, the unpredictable. Those minutes fly by, with these stories twining and weaving and competing for our attention. This is what Those Who Wish Me Dead, a lively, satisfying neo-western and action-thriller, establishes in only its opening minutes. ![]() No one needs to tell this man that he and his son are next. A forensic accountant - the only person, in the wake of the D.A.’s murder, holding the information that is apparently worth killing for - making a run for it. This is the final strand: the prey in question. And the explosion that follows, which will be sure to make the news, sets a clock in motion for the pair’s next kill, who will no doubt hear about it, and who will obviously run, as one does. In the next strand, set many miles away, two men arrive at the home of a district attorney, ostensibly to check the gas - but really, it turns out, to plant an explosive. It’s the kind of job casualty you don’t simply get over. ![]() In the first, a smokejumper is haunted by memories of a burn gone wrong, in which she and other firefighters leapt into the wilds of a flame-swept Montana forest only for the wind to behave differently than they expected, and for a trio of young boys, running to be rescued, to succumb before their eyes. Taylor Sheridan’s Those Who Wish Me Dead - adapted from Michael Koryta’s 2014 novel of the same name - starts as three stories before whittling its way down to one. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |