Last month, after only 40 days of retirement, Tom Brady announced that he would be returning to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for what will be his 23rd NFL season. “These past two months I’ve realized my place is still on the field and not on the stands,” Brady declared on Twitter. “That time will come. But it’s not now.” It has been reported that Gisele Bündchen, Brady’s wife of 12 years, had been trying to get him to retire for years. Why keep subjecting himself to the possibility of serious injury and lifelong brain damage when he had already accomplished more on the field and set more unreachable records than any quarterback in NFL history? Why not step away while he still had his health and could be assured of enjoying an injury-free post-career life with his wife and children? In February, it appeared that Bündchen had finally succeeded in convincing her husband to retire, only to have him retract his retirement announcement not even six weeks after he had made it. Now she must once again look on for another anxious 17-20 games, knowing that every snap her husband takes could be his last as a fully functioning and cognitively healthy man.
Brianne Harper (Gillian Jacobs) faces a similar predicament in The Contractor, which opened last week in theaters and is now available on Amazon Prime, Apple TV+, and other streaming platforms. Brianne is the wife of Sgt. James Harper (Chris Pine), a ranger in the U.S. Army Special Forces. James is coming off four tours of duty in five years with the Army, serving in both Afghanistan and Iraq. After his most recent tour, James had promised Brianne that that overseas tour was his last. Brianne has witnessed too many military funerals of James’s comrades. James had promised Brianne that her days of worrying about such things were over and that he would now be home for good to help raise their young son Jack. James had also promised himself that he would never turn into his obdurate father, a former U.S. Army ranger with whom James had a close bond but who left a still-present hole in James’s life when he served on one mission too many.
But nature calls, and so do debt collectors. James cannot seem to escape either. Having grown up in a military family, the notion of offering his body for his country is in his blood. When the Harpers are faced with a series of mounting bills that include a roof in need of repair, James decides that he will help pay his family’s way out of debt through the only way of life he knows: combat.
James begins training once again for active duty, complete with runs through the woods, innumerable pushups, sleeping in a hyperbaric chamber, and what appear to be some attempts to brush up on his Middle Eastern languages. But after a trip to the U.S. Army base at Fort Bragg, where he is put through a series of medical tests in advance of a possible deployment with the U.S. Army Special Forces, James is told that his lungs are not healthy enough to enable him to serve in high altitudes. Not only that, but his bloodwork is so problematic that he is dismissed from the Army altogether, receiving an honorable discharge but forfeiting his benefits, which include his pension and healthcare.
Now in even more of a bind, James turns to private contracting military work. He has an Army friend, Mike (Ben Foster), who has become involved in this somewhat more lucrative but even more dangerous kind of military service. James has some serious ethical doubts about these kinds of “cowboy tours,” but over a postprandial beer, Mike assures him that he shouldn’t fret too much over it. “It’s OK to cash in,” Mike tells him. “We’re trained to be mercilessly adaptable. Use it. We’re all mercenaries in the end.” The appropriately named Rusty Jennings (Kiefer Sutherland), a grizzled, menacing-looking head of the private military company James will be joining, goes a step further: “We gave them our minds, our bodies, and our spirit. They chewed us up and spit us out.” They abandoned you after all you did for them and for your country, Rusty tells James, but we will never abandon you. Why not join a real brotherhood — and get paid decently for it, too?
James is sold. For his first mission as a private military contractor, he is sent on a Black Ops mission to Berlin to track down the head scientist of a virology laboratory who is said to be working on a vaccine for the H1N1 virus. He is told that the scientist poses a serious bioterrorism threat. Their mission is to seize not only the scientist but his research data in order to prevent the creation of a possible bioterror weapon. When the mission, however, goes from being merely ethically dubious to extraordinarily perilous, James is compelled to go from ruining a scientist’s life to fighting for his own.
The Contractor, directed by Tarik Saleh and written by J.P. Davis, is a crisp, well-constructed action movie with few wasted shots, taut pacing, and heart-pounding sound and editing — the backbones of a superior thriller. Saleh and Davis overlay this strong core with the tissue of movies about complex soldiers who straddle the line between hero and antihero, such as The Hurt Locker (2008), and with the integuments of the Bourne Identity genre of movies about lone wolf soldiers and assassins involved in frequent and cinematically propulsive hand-to-hand combat. Alone, this would be enough for a solid early summer action movie. What is unfortunate are the unnecessary supplements that Saleh and Davis inject into this otherwise healthy body: a subplot centering on vaccines, viruses, and scientific martyrs that not only feels too soon in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic but also reeks of moralizing more fit for a documentary or op-ed than a mainstream Hollywood action movie. Can we really not simply enjoy a solid 100-minute action movie without having to be preached to about the virtues of deferring to whatever goes by the name science?
Pine’s strong, steely performance, thankfully, is strong enough to overcome the film’s gratuitous subplot. The Contractor is a vehicle for Pine that allows him to demonstrate the full range of his action hero abilities and allows us to see him as no mere Matt Damon knockoff but as a legitimate action star in his own right. When Brady finally does retire for good, and when Hollywood decides that it’s time for a Brady biopic, it’s not hard to see them turning to the square-jawed Pine to play the iconic square-jawed quarterback.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Somewhere Over the Rainbow: Wonder and Religion in American Cinema.
