Those Who Wish Me Dead * (2021, Angelina Jolie, Nicholas Hoult, Finn Little, Aidan Gillen, Jon Bernthal) – Movie Review

[Spoiler alert] Director Taylor Sheridan’s Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021) is a perplexingly poor action thriller with Angelina Jolie under-employed and under-engaged as troubled fire-fighter Hannah, who befriends a 14-year-old boy called Connor (Finn Little) being pursued by a couple of nasty assassins (Nicholas Hoult, Aidan Gillen) who have killed his dad, as meanwhile a troublesome forest fire threatens.

This wildfire movie is a misfire, a bit of a struggle to sit through, and you would never want to watch it again. The script never comes to terms with its story or characters, and never offers its actors any decent dialogue. Where, and what is the story? Why are the assassins out to kill everyone? Who are they?

The script doesn’t make a lot of sense, and goes for lots of movie stock situations and clichés, for example it ridiculously resorts to the villains’ weapons jamming not once but twice, to allow the unassailable heroes to escape. How irritating is that?  Then again, a wooden fire tower is going to provide a safe refuge in a wildfire. How annoying is that? When in trouble, which is quite a lot, the writers just throw in some generic jeopardy thriller action, which is very plain and ordinary. The visual effects of bad weather and fire are also perplexingly poor, so you get the full set.

Angelina Jolie, with her sad looks, skinny physique and odd long hair, is hardly the world’s most convincing fire-fighter. It says something that the film’s best performance comes from little Finn Little, a nice little actor, with miscast Hoult and Gillen over-acting dreadfully as unconvincing bad guys, but then they have nothing in the way of characters or dialogue to act on. Jon Bernthal as the amiable sheriff and Medina Senghore as his exceptionally feisty, fight-back pregnant wife Allison are equally adrift in one-note characters. Jake Weber has a rotten role as the boy’s dad.

Those Who Wish Me Dead runs 100 minutes, and feels like a cutdown of a much longer script that explained a few things, but still seems like it runs two hours. It is at best wet Monday afternoon viewing, or late-night TV viewing.

© Derek Winnert 2021 Movie Review

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