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Mar 31, 2022 · Chris Pine and Ben Foster team up to play mercenaries in a solid thriller about losing your faith and finding yourself in a violent reckoning.
Apr 1, 2022 · Other than a remarkable lack of ambition, there’s nothing explicitly wrong or dreadful about “The Contractor.” It checks boxes for what feels like an older audience who misses the days when action movies were made about American heroes instead of super ones. Honestly, those movie watchers deserve better too.
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- An emotional military thriller.
- What is Chris Pine’s best role?
- Winter 2022 Movies: The 30 Most Anticipated Films
- Verdict
By Adam Bankhurst
Posted: Mar 28, 2022 1:00 pm
The Contractor will be available in theaters and on-demand in the U.S. on April 1, 2022.
For me, there is nothing in this world more important than protecting and providing for those I love most, which is exactly why Chris Pine’s new military drama The Contractor hits so close to home. Even if, like me, you can’t relate to the career background of Pine’s Special Forces Sergeant James Harper, there’s a lot that resonates in his painful story and the unfair cards he’s dealt, and Pine’s performance shines through as he carries the heavy weight of his character’s past on screen. Even though the ending and certain action scenes fell a little short of the high bar set by the rest of the film, James Harper’s journey remains a largely compelling one.
Refreshingly, instead of jumping straight into the action and explosions as some military thrillers tend to do, it spends nearly an hour setting the scene before a single bullet is fired. That time is spent introducing us to Pine’s James, his wife Brianne (Gillian Jacobs), and their son Jack (Sander Thomas), showing a loving family whose happy lifestyle is being threatened by ever-growing debt and an honorable discharge that James wanted no part in. Fans of edge-of-your-seat gun fights need not worry as The Contractor eventually has plenty of them, but the time it takes at the beginning grounds the story, the stakes, and it lends much more meaning to what happens next.
Even scenes that might play out as casual pillow talk demonstrate what’s at stake here, including one where Brianne and James discuss the death of a friend who was also in the military. It is presented as not some shocking revelation, but instead as a regular part of their lives, and the normalcy with which they talk about it makes it ever more disturbing.
Captain James T. Kirk (Star Trek)
Steve Trevor (Wonder Woman)
Lord Devereaux (The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement)
Toby Howard (Hell or High Water)
Jack Ryan (Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit)
Cinderella’s Prince (Into the Woods)
All that aside, the journey to that underwhelming conclusion is an exciting one, filled with mostly solid action, shocking twists, and a mirror that presents us with a simple question: are you sure everything is as it seems? It’s no spoiler to say that the answer is clearly no or we wouldn’t have much of a film, but there are plenty of surprises and adrenaline-filled moments that more than make up for that obvious truth.
On that note, while many of the action scenes carried the heft of a big-budget blockbuster, others weren’t quite as sleek, and briefly took me out of the immersion. There was one close-quarters fight in particular that gave me a headache with how many jump cuts there were, some of which would cut away too fast and return farther ahead than they logically should have. Another scene saw a veteran making a very questionable decision for someone of his experience level followed by a fist fight where a few blows that sounded like they hit the target clearly missed on screen.
The Contractor may not have the greatest action scenes or ending, but its heart – which it wears on its sleeve -- still makes it worth watching. Chris Pine gives a superb performance as a man who’s been forced to make some tough decisions after he was abandoned by the country he spent his whole life serving. It’s an emotional examination of how oth...
Mar 30, 2022 · Written by J.P. Davis, “The Contractor” paints a deeply cynical picture of life after service for American military heroes, having destroyed their bodies on the battlefield and being left to fend...
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Jun 7, 2022 · SYNOPSIS: A discharged U.S. Special Forces sergeant, James Harper, risks everything for his family when he joins a private contracting organization. “Isn’t your knee supposed to be damaged to the...
