If you’ve seen the trailers for Those Who Wish Me Dead it looks like an action- thriller were Angelina Jolie fights both bad guys and a forest fire. It is that in broad strokes, but the actual film doesn’t live up to the trailer’s intensity.
A man (Jake Weber) and his son (Finn Little) are on the run from a pair of hit-men (Aiden Gillen and Nicholas Hoult), after the man uncovers a massive conspiracy. The hit-men kill the father. Before he dies he tells his son Connor to run until he finds someone he can trust. Jolie plays Hannah, a depressed and disgraced Smoke Jumper who is now relegated to fire watch duty in a tower. Connor and Hannah cross paths, and Hannah ends up helping him.
This was a well-cast movie, it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Jolie in the main role. Little does a good job as Connor, when kids can often come across as too precocious or just plain annoying in these type of films. The action is very intense. The special effects are top-notch, the fires look like actual forest fires.
But the plot doesn’t really make sense. The conspiracy is never adequately explained . The bad guys are never given enough motivation for all the murders and attempted murders they do.
The tone is the real problem with this movie though. There are multiple occasions where something that is supposed to be intense or dramatic is too silly to take seriously. But nothing seems to be intentionally campy. Everything seems to be played and delivered straight. It’s just a miss for the movie’s director.
I’m rating this an HBO Now. If you’re a huge Angelina Jolie fan, she gives a good performance here. If you really want to watch a good action-thriller I’m sure there are better ones on HBO Max.