There’s a strange disconnect I experienced while watching director Tarik Saleh‘s latest thriller, The Contractor. On one hand, it was powerful, several key moments landing with great impact, making me feel motivated to keep at it, while on the other, it was rather dull and rote, with grandstanding here and there than just didn’t fit. Glossy and well-made with a strong cast, it feels incomplete if not fully realized.
It puts us in the world of James Harper (Chris Pine), a Green Beret with a bum knee who gets discharged from service due to a change in the medication procedures that had him taking steroids for the pain. Out with no income and pension, he’s forced to find work, but rather than look for something behind a desk, he gets recruited by his friend Mike (Ben Foster) to join a secret military operation for the defense department run by Rusty Jennings (Kiefer Sutherland). Believing he’s doing good by his country, his first mission gets him wrapped up in the assassination of a suspected terrorist (Fares Fares) ready to unleash a bio-toxin, which of course ends up not what it looks like, leading James on a life-and-death manhunt to save his own skin.
Saleh knows a good action sequence, putting together a couple of intense infiltration and firefight set-pieces that hit the mark. Something new? Not really, and if you know anything in this genre or played a few tactical video games, have seen it before. But nonetheless, they work, the look and feel on point. It’s just that they don’t bring us anywhere that isn’t what we expect, and unfortunately, Pine, who is a solid actor, can’t lower the emotional boom that’s needed in a few key scenes that really, really needed the boom. Does he try? Yes, but it just feels forced, for me especially in a “twist” that has him facing someone that surprises him but no one in the audience.
The problem is that there’s no suspense in the larger story, the idea that Rusty and his team are not what they look like a given right from the start. That’s probably not the film’s fault, given that it’s practically a trope by now that these things these people do are bad … very, very bad. And that leads to a checklist of must-haves in getting Harper back to Rusty, including chases in city streets, betrayals and confessions by those chasing and running, with car wrecks and narrow escapes. It should be exciting, but like say, superhero movies nowadays, it’s just more of the same.
Worse, the film has no room for the great Gillian Jacobs, who is Harper’s doting wife, worried about his new job, left to a few sparse obligatory glimpses that keep her nearly absent from the story, a mere reminder for Harper that she and their son are why he’s doing this. That leads to the most overdone cliché moment in the genre, that I won’t spoil but is almost laughable as it happens.
Good things are good though. Great even. Fares, playing the would be terrorist is simply fantastic, his role short but pivotal and a key scene in the laboratory where he works is tragic and believable. It’s easily the best I’ve seen of such a thing and as it’s happening, I’m thinking, “this is it” the thing that will drive Harper the rest of the way, and indeed what’s learned becomes motivation for the rest of the story, but the profound impact of what Harper did and does has no weight like it should. I thought about why that is, and I think it’s because Harper has no sympathy, which maybe I get given his line of work, but here’s a thing that should haunt him, but it doesn’t, at least the way I had hoped it would shape his efforts afterward.
Still, while some of these highly trained military folk make some very odd choices (including Mike at the final firefight), I was swept into the action most of the way, appreciating the lack of romanticized style a lot of filmmakers bring to gun battles. Here, it’s fast and and brutal, not that there’s a lot of blood and gore, just things are chaotic and final. I like it when a movie gets thinking that what I’m seeing could be what it’s really like. A few times, that’s what I was thinking.
I can’t say The Contractor isn’t worth seeing. It certainly lacks anything that could set it apart, but it delivers fast action with some good performances. It’s filler, which is what most big budget movies have become, forced to paint inside the lines. Here, the lines are bold.