Review of the film "The Contractor" - a controversial thriller with Chris Pine as a deceived soldier
The 'Star Trek' and 'At Any Cost' star plays an army hero who is on a contract mission for the government - but ends up being targeted himself.
James Reid (Chris Pine) is fired from the U.S. Army without looking at his military decorations or the president's own handshake - it's all because of the medication in his blood that he takes for the pain in his injured knee. Left without a livelihood with a loan behind him, he agrees to the proposal of his friend (Ben Foster) and get a job in an underground CIA structure, entirely consisting of the same poor fellows abandoned by the army. That's just on the very first mission, everything goes wrong, and for some reason James is trying to eliminate his own people. All paths are cut off, there is nothing to do - only fight for life in the hope of seeing the family again.
On lack of fish, as you know, and cancer is a fish. And in a state of complete absence of any high-profile pictures, a mediocre (if not more) action movie with Chris Pine is quite a noticeable premiere. Although in any other case, it would seem that it would not be worth mentioning The Mercenary: it is not for nothing that this film, which is released in the Russian Federation even earlier than in its homeland, appeared on the screens without any marketing. Actors not the last for Hollywood play in it (besides Pine, there is the same Ben Foster, Kiefer Sutherland, Eddie Marsan and Gillian Jacobs), and the name of the director is intriguing at first: Tariq Saleh began his career with the unusual animation "Metropia", then filmed episodes Westworld and Ray Donovan. But this does not help the film in any way: it comes out silently, in a complete vacuum, and in a week its existence will most likely be forgotten by almost everyone who (un)fortunately saw it.
Here, however, not everything is unambiguously bad. The first act of the film hints at the fact that a very curious movie could turn out next - a quiet, almost silent drama about a soldier who is mired in a gray life and obsessions: in his free time he disassembles and assembles a gun, climbs onto the roof in the middle of the night to do something "fix" and sadly deletes the voice messages from the collectors. The Mercenary initially moves somewhere in the direction of Katherine Bigelow's The Hurt Locker and, although it does not offer anything new on the topic of post-traumatic disorder, it talentedly shows the world through the eyes of a person who cannot find a place for himself among cozy suburban houses. The uncomfortable direction of Saleh especially helps here - his camera shoots the characters as if with an overly mechanical, inanimate eye. This is probably how a person who exists "on the machine" really perceives the reality surrounding him.
But then everything breaks down. As soon as the film turns into an adrenaline thriller about a devoted soldier, all the weakest sides of The Mercenary come out. It turns out that the same “uncomfortable” directing is not at all an intentional artistic move, but the result of banal inexperience or even inability. In action scenes, the characters teleport across space from frame to frame, it is almost impossible to follow their movements due to clumsy editing, and banal scenes are very boring: people either mess around in a closed narrow space, or stand on the street and just into each other shooting, in one scene Chris Pine runs against a concrete wall until the enemies are desperately able to hit him from several meters away. And even in absolutely calm scenes of dialogues, Saleh for some reason breaks the rule of the operator's "eight" and constantly confuses the viewer with how the characters are located relative to each other. And this does not look, again, a conscious move, as in some kind of "screen test" by Takashi Miike. It looks like a mistake of a VGIK freshman.
As soon as the stakes rise, it becomes clear that the film was invented very lazily. The hero of Chris Pine is completely determined by daddy issues that have set the teeth on edge - he simply “does not want to be like his father”, and all the secondary characters look more like video game NPCs: they appear to give the protagonist a quest or lay out a little exposure, and then just as suddenly disappear. The adventures of James Reed consist in the fact that he cosplays the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles in the Berlin sewers, and the culmination of the whole action is a one-minute shootout, at the end of which the hero simply enters the house and finishes off the already wounded "boss". It is clear that any film, if desired, can be described with such depreciating sentences and make it sound simpler than it really is. But in the case of The Mercenary, it sincerely seems that it is written with such phrases: being a soldier is sad, the government is lying, family is the main thing.
This article was sponsored by ALAGANT MANAGEMENT LLC
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