Review: Those Who Wish Me Dead

Those Who Wish Me Dead is an old-fashioned thriller in a bunch of ways, and not just because the last fire-fighting action film I saw was 1998's Firestorm, which is memorable solely because towards the end the aforementioned firestorm turns bad guy William Forsythe's head into a burnt match. That's the kind of thing you remember twenty years later; the events of this film, not so much.

Despite Angelia Jolie's face looming large on the poster, this story turns out to involve a wide combination of plot threads, not all of which pay off. Jolie is Hannah Faber, a firefighter haunted by watching a couple of kids fry in a fire (we do not see them fry) and is now a thrill-seeking drunk. Her ex, local sheriff Ethan Sawyer (Jon Bernthal), knows she has a death wish, but good news: she's been posted to a desk job at a fire watch tower. There's no way she'll be able to kill herself there... unless she walks out the front door and jumps off the balcony.

Meanwhile, a hit squad (Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult) are busy murdering people a few states away as part of their efforts to try and retrieve / bury some mysterious evidence that could get a lot of very powerful people in trouble. How powerful? Their boss is played by Tyler Perry. 

Their next target figures out he's next, hits the road with his son Conner (Finn Little), and probably would have escaped if not for the fact he was stupid enough to head straight for the survival camp he left photos of all over his house - a woodland camp run by Ethan and his pregnant wife Allison (Medina Senghore). No prizes for guessing which forest this camp is located in, and when the hit squad take out dad but miss Conner, they figure setting the forest on fire will smoke him out.

That's a lot for a 90 minute movie to deal with; whatever this film's problems, a shortage of plot isn't one of them. It does mean most of the characters are barely sketched in, but it's not like any of them are people you'd want to hang out with. The competent professionalism of the hit squad is probably the film's high point; they may be ruthless killers, but their struggles to get the job done make them a lot more interesting than everyone else.

As Hannah, Jolie has the difficult job of being a rough'n tumble fire-fighting gal while looking like Angelia Jolie, and then also has to pair off with a kid who's constant whining and complaining is both refreshingly accurate (hey, he just saw his dad murdered) and annoying enough to totally justify Jolie's complete lack of chemistry with him. Theirs is not a buddy act for the ages.

Hang on, wasn't the forest on fire? And doesn't this film open with Hannah hanging out with a whole squad of seemingly important-to-the-story smoke-jumpers? Yes and yes, yet the fire only plays a minor role in the story and actually fighting the fire barely gets a look-in, which seems like a waste of yet another interesting element in a film that should be gripping from start to finish and yet ends up just kind of sitting there.

Director Taylor Sheridan (Yellowstone) has written a number of gritty action screenplays (Sicario, Hell or High Water) that have been vastly improved by superior direction, and there's little doubt superior direction would definitely have helped here. Or even sharper editing; the 90 minute run time could possibly be a sign that those involved realised this needed to pick up the pace (and it doesn't feel like anything important was left out), but while the story is somewhat satisfying on a basic level and the performances are all decent enough, this never really catches fire (sorry).

Put another way, a lot of this film is people hurrying through a burning forest at night trying to escape ruthless killers, which should be a lot more exciting than it turns out to be.

- Anthony Morris