Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021)

Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021)

4/10

 

Starring

Angelina Jolie

Finn Little

Nicholas Hoult

Aiden Gillen

 

Directed by Taylor Sheridan

 

I guess I expected way too much from this film and so I partly blame myself for the letdown. This 90s styled action film fails in the aspect of giving us a compelling story that will have you engrossed. Instead, it traded a needed compelling story for a thrilling all-night action sequence which dragged way too much. The film is based on a book of the same name by Michael Koryta, who also worked on the screenplay. The movie has a lengthy somewhat beginning which introduces you to everyone involved in the first thirty minutes. If you skip from there to the last twenty minutes of the film you can still piece it all together easily.

I recall back in the 90s, when all you needed for an action film is a seemingly bad guy sending his goons to take down a family where someone there has evidence against him. One member of the family escapes and with the help of a stranger who somehow was able to stop all the bad guys. That plot summarizes the whole movie except some changes here and there.

In this one, we have Hannah (Angelina Jolie) who is a smoke jumper suffering from nightmares where she lost some of her coworkers in a fire. On the other side of things, a family is murdered by two assassins. The murder was to kill the father and stop him from releasing evidence he has on a series of bad dealings between top people in the government and some mob boss. The forensic accountant who actually dug up this evidence saw the incident on TV and knew it was not an accident (as the murders were covered up as a gas leak explosion) and went on the run with his son. You know how these movies go, time is of no relevance. This man and his son were on the run from the moment the man saw the murders on TV. These assassins first searched for them in their home and took their time to piece together their possible destination, then got ahead of running pair to lay a trap.

The man died, but not after handing over the incriminating evidence to his son asking him to get it to a TV station. While running, he runs into Hannah and together, the two were being hunted by these assassins.

This weak screenplay from the past has been worked on and shaped better in films of today. This film on the other hand decided to not bother to work with the standard of today, but run with a 90s setup.

Acting wise, based on the seasoned actors all lined up in this film I have to say they delivered. Other than that, there is hardly any reason to recommend this film to anyone. I was hoping that having Jolie in the cast will make this movie a compelling one which I cannot wait to tell my friends to go see, but I was disappointed.

You can catch this movie in the cinemas or on HBO Max, but honestly I will say go see something else, problem is that there are very few things to see now adays.