Those Who Wish Me Dead opens in theaters and on HBO Max on May 14. [poilib element="accentDivider"] Back when Angelina Jolie swung across movie screens as Lara Croft, few could have predicted her later-career turn as a family-friendly brand. The ill-fated 2015 romance film By the Sea, co-starring her then-husband Brad Pitt, stands as the actress’s lone adult-driven role in the last decade. In Tony Sheridan’s survivalist thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead, if you squint hard enough, you might just catch glimpses of Jolie in her former Tomb Raider glory. Jack (Aidan Gillen) and Patrick (Nicholas Hoult) -- two contract killers posing as utility men investigating a gas leak -- open Sheridan’s third directed film. They’re carrying out a hit in Fort Lauderdale, Florida of a District Attorney. The pair approach their grisly profession with gallows humor. They complain of budget cuts -- this should be a two-team job -- and a minor bloodstain on Patrick’s shirt that halts their progress to their next victims: Forensic accountant Owen (Jake Weber) and his young son Connor (Finn Little). Suspicious of his colleague’s sudden death, the father and son escape toward shelter in Montana with Owen’s brother-in-law Ethan (Jon Bernthal) and his six-month pregnant wife Allison (Medina Senghore). Sheridan isn’t totally satisfied with this already sturdy set-up. Rather he pitches an additional wrinkle. You’ve probably heard the familiar phrase: When everyone is running out, firefighters are running in. Well, smokejumpers take that maxim to the next level. When everyone evacuates, this band of specialized wildland firefighters parachutes in. Hannah Faber (Angelina Jolie) once stood among the best of the smokejumpers until a blaze went awry. She misjudged the wind, leading to the death of a comrade and three young boys in an uncontrollable forest fire. The mistakes of that day still haunt her today: She drinks heavily, recklessly endangers herself in daredevil acts, and dreams of her regrets to the point of tears. [ignvideo url="https://www.ign.com/videos/those-who-wish-me-dead-official-trailer"] Unlike Sheridan’s previous written and/or directed efforts -- Sicario, Hell or High Water, Wind River, and Without Remorse -- Those Who Wish Me Dead doesn’t center on any socio-political themes like drug cartels, nefarious bankers, the dangers faced by Indigenous women, or rogue military states. In this underdeveloped neo-Western, Sheridan and co-writers Charles Leavitt and Michael Koryta (the author of the same-titled novel this narrative is developed from) try to pack blockbuster thrills into an intimate scope. None of which is wholly believable. For one, Gillen and Hoult play father and son (allow your brain time to work that out). Tyler Perry portrays the low-key contact to their shadowy clients. Sheridan holds enough self-awareness to know how ridiculous this all sounds, and to a point, he leverages these unworkable components for laughs. Both Gillen and Hoult riff heavily on the two-team job quip. But Jolie seems totally miscast as a hotshot smokejumper. An odd turn of events for someone with her action background, but Jolie just doesn’t exude the rough and tumble personality she’s aiming toward. It also doesn’t help that we don’t see her fight a fire. Those Who Wish Me Dead doesn’t find a footing until Connor arrives sans his murdered father. Fleeing from the two assassins, the boy stumbles upon Hannah’s woodland lookout tower. Jolie and Little share an easy rapport buoyed by outlandish dialogue. Hannah teaches Connor how to pick up girls, they exchange sad stories -- apparently having a dead dad is a trump card in any conversation -- and trading harsh barbs. Their pointed give-and-goes mixed with blue language by both parties nearly suffices for us to ignore the glaring flaws blinding Sheridan’s action flick. [widget path="global/article/imagegallery" parameters="albumSlug=best-reviewed-movies-of-2021&captions=true"] Though Hannah and Connor have two hired guns, a lightning storm, and a fast-approaching forest fire on their tails, we never feel the total suspense wrought by these elements. That’s because the trio of hazards makes one too many components for the 100-minute survivalist film to accommodate. Especially when Sheridan wants to lay the groundwork for Hannah’s PTSD. Viewers might be left more enthralled by the robust action -- Jolie works some great stunts as she’s struck by lighting and rappels from great heights -- rather than the big thrills derived from the hard-charging fire. Likewise, Medina Senghore provides major crowd-pleasing swings in her tussles with the two blundering hitmen. And the deaths that do occur under the barrage of bullets are gruesome and rollickingly cartoonish in their violence. Sheridan absolutely wastes the intriguing smokejumpers premise. Outside of the film’s beginning, wherein fractured images of firefighters diving through the air blink across the screen, the only other parachute scene happens towards the end. And it’s not incredibly consequential. There was room for Sheridan to further explore the monumental undertaking shouldered by these first responders, but we learn nothing about them or their methods. Joseph Kosinski’s Only the Brave -- a true story starring Josh Brolin about the hotshot crew in Prescott, Arizona -- showed this profession could be more than a canvas for large action set-pieces. But the scribes for Those Who Wish Me Dead don’t demonstrate the requisite interest to develop that component. Rather this landscape merely serves as a limited canvas. The task to make this tonally quirky neo-Western watchable falls to Jolie: But even her star power and a climactic ending whereupon Hannah is first locked in a deadly duel with Patrick (an equally miscast Hoult), then must literally outrace a forest fire with Connor to safety aren’t enough to stoke the flames. By the time the smoke clears, it’s a reminder of how little of Those Who Wish Me Dead is memorable. [poilib element="poll" parameters="id=7bc9192b-b542-4f0e-9e14-a71a3de695ec"]
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