Producers: Basil Iwanyk and Erica Lee Director: Tarik Saleh Screenplay: J.P. Davis Cast: Chris Pine, Ben Foster, Gillian Jacobs, Eddie Marsan, JD Pardo, Kiefer Sutherland, Florian Monteanu, Nina Hoss, Arira Casar, Fares, Sander Thomas, Aristou Meehan and Nicolas Noblitt Distributor: Paramount Pictures
Grade: C-
It’s difficult to imagine a would-be espionage thriller as predictable, plodding and dull as this one. Instead of “The Bourne Identity,” what one gets here is “The Harper Tranquilizer.”
That’s Harper as in James Harper (Chris Pine, lacking all the charm he exhibited as James Kirk—or Steve Trevor), a straitlaced Special Ops guy who, in J.P. Davis’ flat script, is unceremoniously cashiered from the service by his new CO because a blood test has revealed traces of proscribed drugs—which he’d taken to deal with knee pain caused by an injury in his last mission. While accepting the decision stoically, he can’t help but worry about the effect his loss of pay, benefits and pension will have on his already struggling family, supportive wife Brianna (Gillian Jacobs) and adoring son Jack (Sander Thomas).
No wonder he approaches Mike (Ben Foster), an old comrade now retired with a special-needs son (Nicolas Noblitt) dependent on him, about options. Mike introduces him to Rusty Jennings (Kiefer Sutherland), another ex-military man who runs a team of former soldiers who all, as he says, have been used up and spit out by the establishment. They undertake missions—all in the national interest, and with sotto voce government blessing—under the radar, and the remuneration is decent—50k for an upcoming one in Berlin, for instance. Soon James is on his way to Germany.
The target is Salim Mohsin (Fares Fares), a Syrian virologist working on a project with suspected ties to terrorists. James in initially assigned to watch the man and his family, wife Sylvie (Amira Casar) and son Yanis (Aristou Meehan), but before long the team invades the compound where Salim works in order to force him to turn over a flash drive containing his research. Naturally things go awry and they find themselves under attack and forced to flee.
James saves Mike, whom he insists should leave on his own; but injured himself, he must stay behind and keep one step ahead of pursuers, who—it turns out, not surprisingly—include members of Jennings’ crew as well as the authorities. At one point he gets help from Virgil (Eddie Marsan), an erstwhile operative who’s been long out of the game, but he’s largely on his own; and he will intrude upon Salim’s family to learn the truth about the scientist’s work. In the end, of course, James manages to return to the U.S.A., where, armed with the truth about the corrupt purpose behind the mission, he confronts first Mike and then Jennings, with sanguinary results.
“The Contractor” wants to say something about the country’s callously cavalier treatment of patriotically-minded men and women who have sacrificed so much of themselves and their families by serving in the military. (It’s a theme one can find echoed in an increasing number of films, including Channing Tatum’s recent “Dog.”) The way in which such desperate people can be exploited for corrupt ends is also worth treating.
But employing important issues in a clumsily by-the-numbers and indifferently staged commercial thriller cheapens them rather than doing them justice. The twists in “The Contractor” are so obvious from the start—the moment one enters Jennings’ compound and finds the smirking Sutherland playing the character, Harper’s naiveté becomes almost absurd—and the action sequences that follow in Germany (though many, it seems, were shot in Romania) so prosaically staged that the film never lives up to its ambitions. Even the domestic scenes of Harper and his family have a cookie-cutter quality.
If Pine had found a way to make Harper less stolid and impassive, things might have been different. More shading in the characterization of Jennings—and a more subtle actor than Sutherland in the role—would also have helped. As it is, the best ingredient in the casting lies in the easy camaraderie between Pine and Foster, who of course already paired memorably in “Hell or High Water.” But in that case they were dealing with far superior material. Among the supporting cast only Marsan stands out, but only for the actor’s inimitable look.
Tarik Saleh’s direction is at best efficient, if unimaginative, and the work of the technical crew—production designer Roger Rosenberg, cinematographer Pierre Aïm and editor Theis Schmidt—merely adequate. Despite some frantic chase sequences, neither they nor the cast ever manage to instill much tension or excitement in an enterprise that despite pretensions to significance remains obstinately bland.
A significant portion of the action in “The Contractor” is set in the Berlin sewers. Somehow that seems sadly appropriate.