In a recent interview, the actor, director, and global celebrity Angelina Jolie said that she has been “doing a few acting jobs” of late, rather than pursuing her passion for directing. She’s had changes in her family structure, she said, and thus needs to be home more than a huge directing gig would allow. Her new film Those Who Wish Me Dead (in theaters and on HBO Max, May 14) is one of those acting jobs, which Jolie approaches with efficient professionalism. It may be just a gig necessitated by the whims of life and family, but she tackles it with thorough determination and commitment.
She elevates thin material in that way. The film is directed by Taylor Sheridan, a filmmaker and television creator who has been hailed in the last half-decade as a new kind of cowboy poet, a chronicler of the American west (and Mexico) who sees a tough beauty in the hardscrabble flux of places violently inhabited. Sheridan wrote Sicario and Hell or High Water, wrote and directed Wind River, and created the series Yellowstone, the favorite television show of at least one dad you know.
Sheridan’s work is tense and evocative, seeming to murmur with meaning deeper than the varied adventures of his many cops and outlaws. Is a lot of it over-egged and, I daresay, pretentious macho bullshit? Sure. But I’m nonetheless ever eager to see what he does next. It’s nice to spend time with a filmmaker who is so invested in his creations—not just their propulsive narrative charge, but their broader context in the world. He considers his work in a way plenty of genre filmmakers don’t.
For Those Who Wish Me Dead, Sheridan adapted the eponymous novel with its author, Michael Koryta, and Charles Leavitt. It’s a simple story of a boy, Connor (Finn Little), fleeing some bad men with guns who are picking off people with knowledge of some kind of financial misdeed. Connor finds himself alone and hunted in Montana, where he runs into Hannah (Jolie), a smokejumper with a sad past. Together they fight for survival as two scarily even-keeled killers—played by Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult—pursue them. There are some metaphysics at play in the film, particularly as Sheridan regards his beloved Montana on fire. But for the most part this is a lean, mean little action movie with not much time for contemplation.
Which is a great wheelhouse for Jolie, a physically expressive performer who is always able to locate the pathos behind mortal struggle. (That makes her a great fit for Sheridan.) It is, though, a slight role for someone of her stature. She’s playing a normal enough human being for the first time in many years, which is an intriguing shift. Jolie attempts to mute her movie-star glow with some success, but the film does most of that work for her. Hannah is a driver of Those Who Wish Me Dead’s plot, but she’s not really the lead character of the film, which gives almost as much attention to its villains as it does to its scrambling heroes. Without Jolie’s presence, I suspect the film would exist at a much lower profile, as a competent and trim ensemble action movie that offers no real invention. Jolie’s presence warps the movie’s shape a bit; I found myself wishing for more of Hannah, if only because I wanted to watch Jolie do her thing at greater length.
Those Who Wish Me Dead is missing an act, maybe, some of kind bridge between its drawn-out beginning and its hurried climax. What’s in the film is staged shrewdly by Sheridan, but there’s little sense of cumulative build. Connor and Hannah have only just formed a sorrowful parental-filial bond when the movie ends. There’s almost none of the wilderness survival stuff that the film’s trailer suggests; it’s mostly a series of stand-offs with the bad guys as a forest fire (started by the bad guys) quickly closes in. Despite its sprawling vistas, this is probably Sheridan’s least atmospheric work, mostly because he pulls us through the story at such a clip. The writing is sideways and interesting enough, and the performances adequately persuasive, that I could have spent another half-hour with the film. With that extra time, some true resonance could have started to rattle its curiously prefab construction.
As is, Those Who Wish Me Dead moderately quickens the pulse and briefly introduces us to some characters worth caring about. If you’re anticipating a big Angelina Jolie spectacular, temper those expectations. She just about blends into Sheridan’s gritty scenery, doing her service as an agent of the story with only a few digressions (cultivated by Sheridan) for A-list preening. Her next film, Marvel’s Eternals, has her playing yet another otherworldly being, so this is the last slice of semi-regular life we’ll get from her for a while. It’s quick work. Jolie gets the job done, punches out, and heads home to focus on more important things.
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