The clumsily titled Those Who Wish Me Dead feels like a place-filler in HBO’s deal with Warner Bros. to release a movie a month on its streaming service and in theaters simultaneously. Despite starring Jolie, featuring a supporting cast of ubiquitous faces, and being directed and co-written by a once-promising name, the thriller set against a raging wildfire left this reviewer feeling lukewarm.
Jolie stars as Hannah, a smoke-jumper who suffered a traumatic experience fighting a wildfire, leaving her slightly suicidal and severely sullen. While stationed at a fire watchtower, Hannah encounters a lone boy wandering the woods (Finn Little as Connor) and soon becomes embroiled in a MacGuffin conspiracy uncovered by the boy’s father, resulting in them both being the targets of two professional assassins (Hoult and Game of Throne’s Aidan Gillen). Throw in Medina Senghore as a pregnant survivalist instructor and Jon Bernthal as her cop husband, and you have all the ingredients of a Cliffhanger-esque survival thriller that swaps snowy mountains for the flaming wilds of Montana.
What we get instead is film that is neither excellent nor terrible, neither exciting nor boring. It just . . . is. It’s the flavorless rice-cakes of film. Hannah being a smoke-jumper never comes into play plot-wise. The wildfire the poster promises is only a threat in the final 20 minutes. The conspiracy (i.e. what’s at stake) that Connor’s father uncovers is never revealed (I know, it’s a MacGuffin, but still). The most fleshed-out relationship is between the two assassins, yet it’s unclear whether they’re brothers, work partners, more? It’s hard to describe how a movie can be this not bad/not good. Often, the word used is “forgettable” but how do you forget something that can’t leave an impression in the first place? There is but one good scene in the movie where Hannah and Connor are trading traumas over a campfire at night, a single moment of levity born of pain that, like an ember, threatens to set the rest of the film alight in a conflagration of charm and adventure but instead safely fizzles out. Threat averted.
According to IMDB, Taylor Sheridan was brought in to do rewrites but ended up taking over directing duties when the previous director dropped out. Having written Sicario, Hell or High Water and Wind River, Sheridan had the neo-Western writing bona fides. But, Those Who Wish Me Dead makes one wonder whether Sheridan’s work shines best through the lens of a director other than himself. Wind River, Sheridan’s second feature and first time directing his own script, felt like Fincher-lite. Now, with TWWMD, his direction feels like the anonymous work of someone filming a Ford truck commercial, empty calories with an undercurrent of Americana machismo. Though some blame might be placed on the source material—the movie is based on a book by author Michael Koryta, who co-wrote the script—Sheridan’s bland take on an already boilerplate thriller could be a sign that his rising star might be flaming out.
