Angelina Jolie is back in a meaty action role for this watchable western thriller: playing a firefighter in the Montana wilderness, of all the wildly improbable things. But her natural queenly hauteur, with wide imperious gaze and bee-stung lips, always creates the impression that despite her respirator, axe, smoke-smudged T-shirt and jeans, some functionary is at any moment going to stumble through the flame and debris with her crown on a plump cushion, ready to restore Angelina to the Romanov throne.
Those Who Wish Me Dead is freely adapted from the 2014 bestseller from Michael Koryta, who has written the screenplay with director Taylor Sheridan, a film-maker renowned for tense, taut pictures such as Sicario, Wind River and Hell or High Water. Another film for which he wrote the screenplay, Without Remorse, has only just been released and Sheridan may be in the running for the title of hardest working man in show business.
Hannah, played by Jolie, is a specialist firefighter called a smoke-jumper: the kind who is ’coptered directly into forest blazes. She is angry and boozy and reckless after a bad call she made a while back resulted in deaths. But redemption is on the way. Hannah’s path is to cross with that of a kid called Connor (Finn Little) whose widower dad Owen (Jake Weber) realises their lives are in danger because of a political corruption case for which he, as a forensic accountant, holds all the incriminating information. He desperately has to go on the run along with his son, fixing to get help from his cop brother Ethan (Jon Bernthal) and Ethan’s pregnant wife Allison (Medina Senghore). But this plan is to end up with lonely, scared Connor stumbling through the forest utterly alone, being tracked by two deeply sinister and ruthless assassins played by Aidan Gillen and Nicholas Hoult. And the only person who can help is smoke-jumper Hannah, surveying the forest for conflagrations from her watchtower.
Almost everyone in the film is in danger of being upstaged, as well as horribly murdered, by Gillen and Hoult, in their black suits and fake law enforcement badges, whacking everyone who could identify them. Gillen’s face, with its malign little smile, conveys evil with great economy and this jaded older man’s attitude works interestingly alongside Hoult’s boyish, open demeanour. Who are these guys? Their intimacy looks like that of an older cop and a rookie – except that they’re working for the bad guys – or even a father and son. But there is a horrible fascination in the calm paramilitary professionalism of their conversation. When Gillen and Hoult are alone together on the screen, it is a procedural of villainy: two people who have nothing on their minds but the blank technicalities of murder.
Meanwhile, Hannah is thrown together with poor Connor, and she can protect him (for a while) up in her watchtower. But when lightning wrecks her communications and a new blaze starts sweeping in, she realises they may have to climb down and walk through the storm, in the words of the song. And here we get some plot oddities. It isn’t entirely clear what the point was for the arsonists in setting this new forest fire (its diversionary advantage is surely annulled by the difficulties it creates), and it is disconcerting that Hannah and Connor have to hike through the crackling wood and then turn back and take shelter once more up in their tower.
But it’s a fierce, muscular piece of work, not a million miles from something like the Coens’ No Country for Old Men, and I incidentally enjoyed the haggard old sheriff played by David Hight who gives Ethan advice in a diner over a madly unhealthy steak breakfast. And a prequel for Gillen and Hoult’s hitmen should be on the cards.
• Those Who Wish Me Dead is released in cinemas on 17 May.
