The Doctor’s Diagnosis: D+
I feel like Angelina Jolie has been missing from movies for a while, so it’s kind of fascinating to see her back in this dumpster fire. Those Who Wish Me Dead is a bafflingly inept film. It isn’t even a by-the-numbers action flick because so many numbers are missing; the film is missing so many basic narrative elements that I wonder if it was initially much longer and lost all sense of logic and competency and in the editing room. Based on the flat characters and atrocious special effects, that probably isn’t true, though, and I sure as shit wouldn’t want to sit through a longer cut of this mess anyway.
Angelina Jolie stars as a firefighter in Montana with a troubled past, trying to get over an error in judgement that caused some kids to lose their lives in a forest fire. There is a basic rule in screenwriting called Chekhov’s Gun, which basically states that if a gun is shown in the first act, it should always be used in the third act. In other words, a film shouldn’t introduce a major detail in the beginning if it won’t pay off in the end. According to the rule of Chekhov’s Gun, Jolie’s tragic past should come into play and she should eventually overcome her self-doubt and fight fires again. This doesn’t happen. In fact, that past incident, while it is shown several times, is completely irrelevant.
Instead, we have another plot about a couple of hitmen chasing after a kid after they witnessed them murder his father because….I have no idea. Quite remarkably, the film never establishes the motives of the hitmen (just that they are killing people with sensitive information about something) or who they work for. At one point, they meet up with their (I guess?) boss, played by Tyler Perry, who advises them that they had better not fuck this up. Fuck what up? Who are you people? What are you doing? What’s the point of any of this? The hitmen seem to be trying to pull of a Travolta and Jackson vibe from Pulp Fiction, but they can’t because A. They have absolutely no personality; B. They aren’t threatening and C. The audience is never given any fucking context for what they are doing.
These plots intersect when the hitmen chase the kid into the forest where Jolie is stationed in a watch tower (and, incredibly, she doesn’t pack a gun for her long solo shift in the middle of the Montana woods). In a puzzling move, our villains then set the forest on fire to distract the authorities from their activities. Folks, there are two fucking cops in this town and the hitmen kill one of them and kidnap the other in comedically-easy fashion. There are literally no other authorities and they do the one fucking thing that would attract more cops to the area. I haven’t gone to hitman school, but I think they would teach you that setting a place on fucking fire is not the way to avoid attention.
We need to talk about the forest fires because this is seriously some of the laziest shit I’ve ever seen. Look, I’m trying to make peace with the constant use of computer effects. I’m really trying. But this movie looks hilariously awful. The characters constantly look like they have a screen-saver of a forest fire in the background and computer-generated burning embers floating past them. It’s hard to feel any sense of danger when characters are running from a fire (which is either immobile or spreading at the speed of light, depending on what the story needs) that looks like the background of a Doom level. I don’t even mean a newer Doom, I mean Doom II. And Doom II still had a better plot than this.
The one positive note is Jolie, who is largely playing against type as a tough, foul-mouthed, blue-collar firefighter. The usually extravagant actress pulls this off with surprising ease and creates a character that you really want to have a beer with. Her banter with the kid and fellow firefighters are easily the highlight of the film and I really wish that this had been built around the comradery of this group of firefighters. There was something interesting and fun to be done with that as a base, but this sure as hell isn’t it.
With eighteen producers (eighteen!), I suppose that a mess was inevitable. However, director and co-writer Taylor Sheridan (who I know best as an actor from a 1995 episode of Walker, Texas Ranger; it’s the episode where Walker kicks a dude in the face) has crafted a true disaster here. The script is borderline incoherent, the action scenes are flat and the effects look like they are lifted from a skit in a YouTube video. I have no idea how they got Angelina Jolie for this, but even she can’t raise this beyond the level of pure amateurism.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Those_Who_Wish_Me_Dead#/media/File:Those_Who_Wish_Me_Dead.png
