Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021 | USA | 100 minutes | Taylor Sheridan)

If I were to be asked for a single word to sum up Taylor Sheridan’s new movie Those Who Wish Me Dead, it would be “competent.” It’s a predictable action/thriller but it has three things going for it: acting, storytelling, and the gorgeous Montana scenery.

With the Tomb Raider movies in 2001 and 2003, Salt in 2010, and now Those Who Wish Me Dead, Angelina Jolie has proven herself as a legitimate action star in three decades. She plays Hannah, a cloudjumper in Montana who’s confined to watching for wildfires from a control tower after failing her psych evaluation following making some mistakes in a wildfire a few years back that led to some children being left for dead.

The plot surrounds a Florida man named Owen (Jake Weber, a dead ringer for author Thomas Frank), a forensic accountant that uncovers some financial shenanigans that threaten some powerful people. When he sees on the news that his boss, a district attorney, has his home blown up, he hits the road with his precocious twelve year old son Connor (Finn Little) and heads to Montana to hide out because his brother-in-law Ethan (the Punisher) works in law enforcement up there and he can stay with him and his pregnant wife Allison (Medina Seghorne). The killers (Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult) who took out the Florida DA (improbably) deduce that he’s heading to Big Sky country because of a photo they find in Owen’s abandoned house. This would’ve been a different movie if he also had another relative somewhere in Missouri. 

When Owen is ambushed along a highway, he doesn’t make it, but Connor does. He’s left alone in the middle of BFE, MT, until Hannah happens upon him. She tries to keep him safe and get him into town, where he can hopefully pass his father’s secrets onto the news media. To complicate things, the assassins start another wildfire because they think it’ll give them a tactical advantage to capture Connor. 

Once the plot is established, the movie turns into a cat-and-mouse game running on adrenaline. There’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but the final forty minutes are pretty intense and absorbing. It was a wild ride that I enjoyed taking. There is not much more to say. I think Taylor Sheridan paced the movie nicely and the acting was quite good, particularly from Angelina Jolie, a bona fide movie star that can carry action thrillers on her back. And does.

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Those Who Wish Me Dead is currently streaming on HBO Max and can be found in theaters.