Never Work Abroad

I like Chris Pine. As an actor I feel like the dude is pretty solid. He’s likable, charismatic, and brings his whole self to a performance. I don’t always think he’s the most well cast for the roles he’s given – his Captain Kirk feels very far from William Shatner’s Kirk, which was much more of an issue when Star Trek 2009 came out than it is now with even more variations on the Kirk performance to choose from – but damn if the dude isn’t watchable. He can be in crap but he at least tries to make his part of it less crappy by comparison.

Even then, though, Pine struggles to make a film like The Contractor work. The movie is one of a dozen you’ve likely seen before: a soldier gets tapped to do a mission, gets double-crossed, has to find his way home, all while talk of patriotism and America swirl around. I’ve reviewed a few of these things, like Without Remorse and Jack Ryan, and they’re all basically the same. It’s the cinematic equivalent of Dad Rock, something familiar, something fun, but nothing that will challenge you in any specific way. Dads like guns, beer, and the American way, and films like this are their sitting on the couch entertainment.

That doesn’t make them good. In fact, I’d argue most of the films that can qualify for the Dad Rock genre are pretty bad. To avoid saying anything controversial or pissing off the audience, everything has to be very tightly controlled. Plots have to take certain contrivances so that the good old USA isn’t demeaned in any way. Our heroes have to be heroic in a specific way, the bad guys just bad enough that we don’t have an issue with them dying. We have to hit the notes, by the numbers, so the rah-rah moments continue. Blame Top Gun, but we all know exactly how a Dad Rock film is gonna play.

In the film Pine plays Sergeant First Class James Harper, a former Army Ranger who was recently let go due to steroid and drug use (which was perfectly acceptable in his unit before but, with a new guy in charge, is suddenly a call for discharge). He has a devoted wife, Brianne (Gillian Jacobs), and son, and he wants to do right by them. The discharge, though, wiped out his pension and benefits, leaving him without many options as to what to do next. He could get a job that wouldn’t make him enough to pay his bills, or he could go corporate and get some kind of contract work, which he swore he’d never do.

His buddy, Mike Hawkins (Ben Foster), works for a private military company run by Rusty Jennings (Kiefer Sutherland), who Mike trusts. James and Mike served together on multiple tours, and since Mike swears by Rusty, James accepts that and agrees to work for them. They get assigned to surveil a suspected bio-terrorist working in Germany, so Mike and James ship out. James handles the surveillance, and then soon they are told to infiltrate the bio research lab where the weapon is being made. But things quickly go off the rails, and James discovers the mission they were on wasn’t at all what they were told. He finds himself on the run, all alone, and forced to do whatever he can to get back to his wife and kid. Whatever it takes.

There is nothing surprising or deep about The Contractor. It’s your standard guy “with a particular set of skills" on the run story. You could swap out characters and bad guys for a dozen different Dad Rock movies or shows like this and nothing would really change. Guy gets a mission, finds out it wasn’t what he thought it was, and then has to kill a bunch of people to make it all right. Same story, different characters and locations, but you know exactly what’s going to happen long before it even does.

A real issue the film has is that it rushes all its beats. The first act establishes everything we need to know about James, from his discharge to his money problems and then getting a job with Rusty, and while it’s all very efficient in getting us through the story it lacks a lot of heart. Pine and Jacobs are great, and there’s real chemistry between them for the few scenes they share, but it all feels perfunctory (despite their best efforts) when it’s clear the film doesn’t really care about where James is at, it just wants him out in the field, ready to kill.

Here, too, things are rushed. The film doesn’t want to take its time, lulling us into a false sense of security. Instead James goes on his very first mission with the group and it immediately goes titsup, leaving him stranded and running away from the very people he was supposed to be working for. If the film could have taken its time, let us watch James work a few missions first (even if in montage form) at least then we’d get the sense that the company wasn’t entirely bad. But when Rusty immediately sends him on a bum mission and then double-crosses our hero, it doesn’t resonate. We have no reason to think the mission is anything other than a scam because the film doesn’t do the work otherwise.

Bear in mind the film is only just over 100 minutes long. We could have easily had a couple of extra missions thrown in, quickly so we get a feel for the work James is doing, without even pushing the movie past the two hour mark. It’s weird that the film felt the need to be so svelte and tight since it really didn’t have to. It plays like a greatest hits album (for our Dad Rock analogy) of all the beats you expect from one of these films, but it rushes through the best bits so it can get you out before you get too bored. It doesn’t work.

Hell, even the casting telegraphs who the good guys and bad guys are. James is played by Pine, and Chris Pine usually plays the hero in his movies. Keifer Sutherland frequently plays bad guys, and he’s famous for playing the “plays by his own rules” hero of 24. He’s the bad guy here because he doesn’t work for the government and it’s pretty clear, even before he does anything evil, that he’s bad because Keifer is playing him and Keifer never plays by the rules. And then there’s Ben Foster, who also generally plays scummy bad guys (The Punisher, The Mechanic, 3:10 to Yuma). Even before anything bad happened I knew it would because a character played by Ben Foster vouched for it. Never trust that guy.

Look, we’re not supposed to take this film too seriously or care about it too deeply. A couple of decades ago this would have been the kind of film you watched because it was on HBO while you were flipping past. It’s fodder, channel filler material that entertains while it’s on and then exits your brain just as quickly once it’s over. This isn’t a film meant to last, it just exists. It’s fine for what it is, but this is contract work, through and through. Not just in the title and story but for the actors as well. We should be happy they all got paid, but we don’t need to care about The Contractor once the credits roll.