REVIEW: 'Those Who Wish Me Dead' lets good ideas burn out of control
Angelina Jolie stars in Those Who Wish Me Dead, co-written and directed by Taylor Sheridan.
The mainstream human-vs.-nature movie isn’t one we see all that often these days. We might get one or two every couple of years featuring a major star and a decent supporting cast. To be clear, I’m not talking about disaster movies, especially bargain-bin ensemble pieces that do brisk business on streamers like Amazon Prime. Instead, I’m talking about movies that primarily feature one or two characters, left with nothing but their wits against an impassive, seemingly impossible force.
Perhaps the human-vs.-nature movies are going the way of many mid-budget releases: not competitive enough with blockbuster cinematic universes for theatres, and not cheap enough to be tossed on whatever platform feels like grabbing the rights. That may be why Taylor Sheridan’s newest directorial effort Those Who Wish Me Dead is such a throwback; plenty of other critics have noted how much it resembles a movie that got tossed in a time machine in the mid-90s and ended up here.
So maybe it’s nostalgia for a different era of moviemaking talking, but Sheridan’s movie (while unexceptional in many ways) still makes for decent home viewing. It arrives at a time when theatres are nervously opening up, and we may be tiring of the distinct direct-to-Netflix vibe of features that came out during the pandemic. Those Who Wish Me Dead would have been a lot better had it committed to a single main character, or showed a bit more interest in following some of its story threads through to the end. Nevertheless, it may still have held its own in a theatre at some point in the not-too-distant past, at least prior to the inferno of superhero media.
The story begins in the scorching air above a forest fire in Montana. Hannah (Angelina Jolie) is a smokejumper, tasked with parachuting into the path of a fire and attempting to slow its spread. The scene is revealed to be a traumatic flashback for Hannah, the reason why she wakes up terrified at night; the fire changes direction suddenly, engulfing one of Hannah’s colleagues and a group of young boys. Somehow, Hannah survives, but the memory obviously lingers.
Hannah must protect the teenaged Connor (Finn Little) from government-sponsored assassins.
Based on this opening, we might expect the rest of the movie to focus on Hannah coming face to face with another fire, and learning to overcome her misplaced guilt. This is a Taylor Sheridan movie, though. So in the tradition of movies he’s written (Sicario, Hell or High Water) and directed (Wind River), it needs to have some human evil on par with the natural menace. In this case, Hannah crosses paths with Connor (Finn Little), the teenage son of a forensic accountant (Jake Weber) fleeing a government conspiracy. Chased by two efficient assassins played by Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult, Connor seeks refuge with Hannah, all while a fire sparked by the assassins bears down on everyone.
It makes for a maelstrom of plotlines, and the movie variably wants to assign protagonist duties to Hannah, Connor, or Ethan (Jon Bernthal), a local sheriff’s deputy, depending on the scene. Unfortunately, the characters never unite such that they become a true ensemble, so the result is more like a series of vignettes linked by a common situation. What we’re ultimately lacking is the “controlling idea” from Robert McKee’s book, Story.
There are the beginnings of chemistry in these segments. In a more focused story, Hannah’s relationship with Connor could have grown into an interesting connection, where he learns from her rule-breaking nature and she becomes a de-facto mother figure. In the Ethan parts, we could have explored more of the cat-and-mouse chase between the assassins and Ethan and his wife Allison (Medina Senghore), letting the couple pit their wilderness knowledge against the villains’ technology. It’s likely that Sheridan would have needed the movie to be at least two and a half hours to properly contain all these ideas, and I doubt there would be enough philosophical stakes to hold all of that together.
But along the way, Sheridan does show off his skills: action scenes are tightly and logically choreographed, and the screenplay never runs out of ways to beat up Jolie’s character. It’s seemingly in response to the question of how a woman who looks like Jolie would ever end up sequestered in a fire watchtower in rural Montana. Throughout the movie, Hannah dodges lightning twice (getting struck once), rope-burns her hands, is shot at by high-powered rifles, gets brutally battered by an assassin, and of course outruns massive walls of fire. Another character even rides to the rescue on a white horse. It might be a backhanded compliment, but at one point I said out loud: “This movie’s got everything.”
Aidan Gillen as Jack, one of the two killers stalking the Montana wilderness.
Arguably, the part of the film that makes its premise most interesting is the forest fire, yet it’s the part that Sheridan seems the least interested in. It’s clear that Hannah knows her way around them, and bits of her survival skills do reveal themselves. But the fire never becomes the real enemy in the way that it should. Any movie can have gun-wielding assassins chasing down a target, but I wanted more attention paid to what makes fires unpredictable, especially in light of how much more common they’re becoming on a warming planet. At the end of the movie, Hannah claims to have looked into the eye of the fire and found it beautiful, but we since we don’t spend enough time exploring Hannah’s dynamic with the fire, the scene feels perfunctory.
Even so, I find myself carefully recommending Those Who Wish Me Dead. It may be just two-thirds of a much better movie, and it’s significantly less affecting than Sheridan’s last feature, Wind River. But the premise is novel enough, even if the execution is unbalanced. It may not be able to restart the human-vs.-nature genre, but it suggests that maybe those struggles should come back to our screens when the time is right.
Those Who Wish Me Dead gets two and a half stars out of four.
Stray thoughts
I wonder if there’s a version of this movie where Tyler Perry was needed for more than four hours of shooting.
I doubt there will be a sequel, but if one was ever made, it should be about Senghore’s character, Allison.