The Contractor

I’m on Twitter. Recently, a friend asked me to check out someone on the site, saying he’s got “interesting content.” I searched the guy’s timeline and didn’t follow him. “Why not?” my buddy asked. I told him I had gone through 15 or 20 tweets and “couldn’t find a way in,” meaning I couldn’t find tweets I could connect to. I thought about that exchange while I watched The Contractor because I couldn’t get into this movie. It’s the work of the filmmakers to get audiences to become emotionally involved in the happenings on the screen. In this instance, they fail to accomplish that objective.

James Harper (Chris Pine) is a Special Forces Agent of multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. When a drug test reveals he has been using drugs to ease his pain, James is involuntarily discharged and stripped of his pension and benefits. With mounting bills, James must find new employment. He is introduced to the world of private contracting by his pal Mike (Ben Foster). James meets with Mike’s boss Rusty (Kiefer Sutherland) and not long after, he and Mike are in Berlin on a black ops mission to prevent middle eastern scientist Salim Mohamed Mohsin (Fares Fares) from creating a biochemical agent.

Normally, I don’t care much about character development in an action thriller. Here, though, so much time is spent building James’s character, I expected those efforts to gain currency later. They don’t. There are flashbacks of life with his father that imply James has abandonment struggles. The fact that Special Forces have dropped him should only intensify his feelings of betrayal. Instead, James isn’t emotionally devastated by the military’s rejection. His discharge comes off as an excuse to force him into a different line of work to support his family. And the father flashbacks don’t resonate as they should. For all the focus on character in the film’s first third, I never cared about the main character.

Screenwriter J.P. Davis and director Tarik Saleh don’t give James the bonds he should have. He clearly loves his wife Brianne (Gillian Jacobs) and son Jack (Sander Thomas), yet when he’s off in Berlin trying to avoid forces that want to kill him there’s too little sense that he needs to get home to his family. James might have imagined Jack growing up with the same feelings of desertion that he has felt because of his father. The family ties would have brought a welcome element to the story and made me feel for James. As it is, James might as well be a bachelor.

Saleh’s direction plods in the first 30 minutes, making the protagonist’s character development more lifeless than it should have been. Some of the Berlin action sequences are watchable in Bourne-like way, though there are times when James is open to being shot and the gunman unbelievably keep missing him. The climax contains action and tense moments, but it finishes too quickly to be altogether fulfilling. Sound is joltingly effective during the part where there’s an unexpected gunshot and a thump afterward.

Because James isn’t successfully written, Chris Pine can’t create a good character out of him. Pine, however, does well in individual scenes, as when he persuasively illustrates his rage at the situation he has been put in late in the movie. Ben Foster performs competently as Mike, although I wish he had been in more of the movie. The same can also be said about Kiefer Sutherland’s Rusty, who needed to be in more scenes to make an impact. This skimpy section on acting suggests what I wrote about a couple paragraphs ago: The Contractor is too much of a one-man show.