Angry, boozy and haunted by her past, a smoke-jumper faces unexpected dangers in this fierce action film set in the Montana wilderness
Angelina Jolie is back in a meaty action role for this watchable western thriller: playing a firefighter in the Montana wilderness, of all the wildly improbable things. But her natural queenly hauteur, with wide imperious gaze and bee-stung lips, always creates the impression that despite her respirator, axe, smoke-smudged T-shirt and jeans, some functionary is at any moment going to stumble through the flame and debris with her crown on a plump cushion, ready to restore Angelina to the Romanov throne.Those Who Wish Me Dead is freely adapted from the 2014 bestseller from Michael Koryta, who has written the screenplay with director Taylor Sheridan, a film-maker renowned for tense, taut pictures such as Sicario, Wind River and Hell or High Water. Another film for which he wrote the screenplay, Without Remorse, has only just been released and Sheridan may be in the running for the title of hardest working man in show business.Hannah, played by Jolie, is a specialist firefighter called a smoke-jumper: the kind who is ’coptered directly into forest blazes. She is angry and boozy and reckless after a bad call she made a while back resulted in deaths. But redemption is on the way. Hannah’s path is to cross with that of a kid called Connor (Finn Little) whose widower dad Owen (Jake Weber) realises their lives are in danger because of a political corruption case for which he, as a forensic accountant, holds all the incriminating information. He desperately has to go on the run along with his son, fixing to get help from his cop brother Ethan (Jon Bernthal) and Ethan’s pregnant wife Allison (Medina Senghore). But this plan is to end up with lonely, scared Connor stumbling through the forest utterly alone, being tracked by two deeply sinister and ruthless assassins played by Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult. And the only person who can help is smoke-jumper Hannah, surveying the forest for conflagrations from her watchtower.