Too soon, too soon.
With two horrific fire seasons still fresh in everybody’s memory — and the uneasy potential of a pending third — it’s ill-advised and extremely tasteless to set a survival thriller against the backdrop of deliberately torched forest land.
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| Hannah (Angelina Jolie) and Connor (Finn Little) discover, to their horror, that the most direct route to town — and safety — has been blocked by an expanding forest fire. |
I’m not sure who to blame. Director Taylor Sheridan gave us 2017’s terrific Wind River — which he also wrote — but he’s also the prime mover behind television’s mean-spirited and unrelentingly trashy Yellowstone.
This new film’s primary flaw is its impressively inept screenplay, adapted from Michael Koryta’s well-received 2014 novel. Sheridan co-scripted this adaptation — along with Charles Leavittt and Koryta — so they collectively are at fault.
It’s other flaws notwithstanding, this is yet another recent film — following Minari and Together Together — that stops before properly concluding. I can’t figure it out; are these production companies running out of money?
In this case, there’s no resolution involving a key villain: ergo, any perceived success our heroes achieve is temporary at best, and therefore pointless. That’s completely unsatisfying … and, I’ll wager, not the way Koryta’s novel ends.
It’s also obvious that Koryta’s story has been tweaked and shaped to better showcase the character played by star Angelina Jolie, undoubtedly at her insistence, as a means of demonstrating that she still has bad-ass chops. To her credit, she gets to prove it.
She plays Hannah, an elite firefighter — a smokejumper — based amidst a massive swath of Montana forest land. Alas, she’s seriously damaged goods, due a recent fire catastrophe during which she was unable to save three children. Badly traumatized and unable to move beyond her “failure,” she indulges in self-destructive stunts and minor physical mutilation.
She spends most of her time in self-imposed isolation, in the solitary confinement of a forest watchtower high above verdant greenery below.
Hannah has friends, who care about her deeply: Ethan (Jon Bernthal), a local deputy, who with his wife Allison (Medina Senghore), runs a wilderness survival school.
Elsewhere, several states away, forensic accountant Owen (Jake Weber) suddenly realizes that his work has put him — and everybody he knows intimately, which includes his young son Connor (Finn Little) — in grave danger. Unable to trust local cops — who might be involved in one helluva huge (and never clarified) conspiracy — Owen hits the road with the confused and scared Connor.
Destination: Montana, and Ethan and Allison, who are related by marriage.
Not far behind: Jack (Aidan Gillen) and Patrick (Nicholas Hoult), a pair of ruthless, meticulously precise and coldly sociopathic assassins, who take their marching orders from the mysterious Arthur (Tyler Perry, whose character also never is explained).
Gillen and Hoult are chilling: the epitome of walking, breathing Evil, as vividly demonstrated when they’re introduced.
Gillen, similarly infamous as “Littlefinger” Baelish in Game of Thrones, grants Jack a casual grin as each anticipated act of mayhem is calculated and then executed; this laid-back calmness makes him even creepier. Hoult, playing wildly against type — goodness, he was the kid in 2002’s About a Boy! — makes Patrick more primal: a feral killing machine who enjoys it.
Circumstances soon throw Connor and Hannah together; we know immediately — thanks to the grim resolve on Jolie’s face, and the flint in her gaze — that she’ll save this boy, or die trying.
The latter seems much more likely, given her opponents.
Jolie persuasively handles her character’s transition. As introduced, Hannah is reckless and out of control; her expression is manic, her haunted eyes looking through reality and seeing only the three kids she couldn’t save. But with Connor’s arrival, that gaze becomes steady and focused, her posture and behavior adjusting to convey the stability and resourcefulness that this terrified boy badly needs.
Good as she is, though, Little out-performs her. The young Australian actor, possibly remembered from 2019’s poignant Storm Boy, runs through a powerful gamut of emotions as Connor recoils, responds, adjusts and ultimately accepts these horrific circumstances. Little knows how to set his mouth, and fine-tune his posture, to convey the nuance of a given encounter or conversation.
Bernthal’s Ethan is an amiable “man’s man” who’s completely comfortable while cursing and goofing with Hannah’s fellow firefighters: a testosterone-fueled attitude he subdues when in his wife’s company. No surprise: Senghore’s Allison is a feisty firecracker who clearly doesn’t tolerate macho crap from anybody. After all, she is a fellow survivalist.
Their relationship is quite touching; Ethan and Allison clearly are devoted to each other.
None of Hannah’s fellow firefighters is granted anything remotely approaching a distinctive personality.
The out-of-control fire that Jack and Patrick set, to camouflage their lethal activities, is an inept plot contrivance. Granted, it adds to the danger once Hannah and Connor are on the run, but — as also is true of Perry’s character — it eventually becomes an afterthought. We never see any of Hannah’s colleagues working to contain the expanding blaze, which feels odd (and, actually, ridiculous); apparently this inferno is dealt with after the end credits roll.
Ben Richardson’s cinematography conveys the region’s lushness — although filming actually took place in New Mexico — and, once the fire starts, the camerawork definitely grants the blaze something of a personality, as if its threatening behavior is purposeful, rather than random.
Editor Chad Galster keeps the pacing taut and suspenseful; this 100-minute film never feels slow.
The core story is gripping and reasonably well executed, and likely will satisfy viewers able to ignore the vexing sidebar details and omissions.
Alas, this viewer couldn’t get beyond them.
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