Chris Pine Chases Around the Airless Plot of ‘The Contractor’

Alci Rengifo

Now it is Chris Pine’s turn to strap on his guns and go through the rite of passage that makes him into a straight-to-streaming action hero. This does not mean at all that his days as a big screen attraction are numbered. Plenty of other big names take a detour to become assassins on the run. Some of these outings can be guilty popcorn pleasures. “The Contractor” is, unfortunately, a rather sleepy thriller. It’s another odd example of great casting used for a mundane exercise. Pine more than fits the lead role with his intense stare and all-American presence. The plot has promise, if it were allowed to really get goofy and wild. Instead, this is an action snoozer where any quick distraction might make you forget to watch the rest.

Pine plays Special Forces Sergeant James Harper, who was once a great soldier but a leg injury led to a dependency on drugs. His superiors decide to give him an honorable discharge, with the added punishment of having his pension and benefits stripped away. Harper and his wife, Brianne (Gillian Jacobs), are now drowned in bills and debt. They also have a young son, which adds to the household pressure. A lucrative job opportunity arrives when James’s former squad mate Mike (Ben Foster), offers him a gig as a soldier of fortune for another veteran, Rusty Jennings (Kiefer Sutherland). James takes the offer and is soon joining a team of mercenaries landing in Germany to extract data from a scientist named Salim (Fares Fares), who is apparently linked to potential bio-terrorism. When the operation goes awry and Salim is killed, James suspects there’s something more nefarious behind Jennings’s business. By daylight, James is the one on the run, avoiding mercenaries now targeting him.

It’s rather surprising how director Tarik Saleh finds little to do with such weighty subject matter. The screenplay by J.P. Davis blends in economic hardship, the opioid crisis and the very real world of mercenary firms, yet comes out so empty-handed. There’s little intensity to the dialogue or pace. Saleh instead just checks off sequences shot with the scope of bad network TV movies. Pine was given meatier dialogue in J.J. Abrams’s “Star Trek” movies and better action star moments in “Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit.” You can almost analyze “The Contractor” as just a series of moments. The mercenaries attack Salim’s lab in Germany, he dies, then it’s rehashed scenes of James swimming through a river, hiding in the woods caked in mud, or figuring out a blood transfusion for an injured Mike in a sewer tunnel. And it all happens very briskly without giving us a chance to actually care. 

There is no exaggeration in saying that about sums up “The Contractor.” Everyone is a stale caricature with little exposition. We learn that James’s dad was once in the Special Forces too, and approved of his young son getting an American flag tattoo on his arm. The script never probes much further because he needs to jump back into a public river when Jennings’s goons appear on motorcycles ludicrously firing at their target in broad daylight. Unsurprisingly, there are a few double crosses James uncovers, all linked to a plot that will give the Covid denialists plenty of validation. James discovers he was probably a stooge for a scheme involving stopping a vaccine from being developed, in order for the powers that be to unleash a virus that will prove lucrative for big pharma. It’s all more said than shown. Pine plows through the narrative doing lots of crouching while holding a rifle aloft. 

“The Contractor” is obviously a thriller on the lower budget spectrum. Such a situation should inspire filmmakers to focus on a better story. There are plenty of sources to find juicy material on mercenary life, such as Jeremy Scahill’s unsurpassed book “Blackwater.” The Putin regime has reportedly sent a squad of mercenaries dubbed The Wagner Group, named after the composer Richard Wagner, into Ukraine. That bit of news alone has way more unnerving tension than anything in “The Contractor.” A final standoff in an isolated compound deep in the woods feels like a yawn. We’ve been here before, so many times. Pine fits the role so well he deserves better, as well as Kiefer Sutherland, who just stands around looking like a bad attempt at satirizing a Jan. 6 rioter. This is a thriller where the premise is more intriguing than the execution.

“The Contractor” releases April 1 in select theaters, VOD and Paramount+.