The late-blooming and meteorically successful filmmaker Taylor Sheridan, a writer and director who grew up on a West Texan farm and today owns several ranches, has carved a niche as a creator of gritty, plausible, and commercially successful thrillers about the modern American West. After an earlier, indifferent career as an actor — his best-known role was a recurring part as a square-jawed policeman in the motorcycle gang series Sons of Anarchy — Sheridan decided around 10 years ago to try his hand at writing. He has since ushered in a one-man revival of the neo-Western.
His first film as a screenwriter was 2015’s Sicario, a brooding, clammy, and almost nihilistically dark thriller about an FBI agent seconded to a secretive United States military operation against a Mexican drug cartel. Directed with typical panache by the Quebecois filmmaker Denis Villeneuve and filmed by the legendary British cinematographer Roger Deakins, Sicario is structured like a Conradian journey to the heart of darkness or a rung-by-rung descent into hell. The film, which posits the existence of an extralegal national security apparatus almost as scary as the murderous cartels, was a sensation, grossing $85 million and earning Sheridan a Writers Guild nomination for best original screenplay. He followed Sicario, in rapid succession, with two other commercial and critical successes: Hell or High Water (2016), about two brothers in West Texas who start robbing banks after their family farm is foreclosed on, and Wind River (2017), about a federal agent and a professional hunter who team up to investigate the murder of a Native American woman on a Wyoming reservation.
Those three projects, which Sheridan has described as a loose thematic trilogy about the modern frontier, were graced by tight scripts, good casting, and a determination to avoid the more cliched trappings of action movies. At a time when Hollywood is asphyxiated by borderline-unwatchable superhero franchises, Sheridan’s films came as a relief. They also, in their gestures to topicality (the drug war, farm foreclosures, violence against indigenous women), felt relevant and vaguely morally elevated. And there was more to come. In 2018, the Paramount Network unveiled Sheridan’s first TV series, Yellowstone, an expensive prestige drama about a powerful cattle ranching family in Montana. The show, an audience hit, is slated for a fourth season and already has two spinoffs in production. Sheridan also wrote a sequel to Sicario, 2018’s Sicario: Day of the Soldado, and Amazon’s recent Tom Clancy adaptation Without Remorse.
Yet Sheridan’s impressive pace of production may be his Achilles’ heel. Critics have been less kind to his more recent work: Yellowstone, although not without its charms, is melodramatic and given to hammy dialogue, the Sicario sequel was fine but arguably needless, and Without Remorse is, by most reports, terrible. His latest film, Those Who Wish Me Dead, now in theaters and on HBO Max, feels, unfortunately, like a continuation of that slump in quality. Directed by Sheridan and written by Sheridan, Charles Leavitt, and Michael Koryta, and also adapted from a novel by Koryta, Those Who Wish Me Dead takes familiar Sheridan tropes (a Western setting, a strong female lead working in a traditionally male occupation, eruptions of violence) and stirs them together into a mostly forgettable action potboiler.
Angelina Jolie plays Hannah, a wilderness firefighter and former smokejumper in Montana traumatized by a disastrous operation in which she watched, helplessly, as a colleague and several children were killed by a forest fire. Too shaken to return to regular firefighting duty, she volunteers for more contemplative work as a fire watcher, living alone in a lookout tower at the edge of a vast forest. Meanwhile, in the altogether less rugged landscape of Miami, a mysterious and highly professional pair of hit men (Aiden Gillan and Nicholas Hoult) assassinate a prosecutor who is investigating a criminal conspiracy that, we are led vaguely to understand, implicates powerful and dangerous people. (The conspiracy is a MacGuffin, and we never learn any more about it.) A forensic accountant working on the investigation (Jake Weber) correctly fears that he is next. Not trusting local authorities, the middle-aged and widowed accountant takes his adolescent son (Finn Little) and goes on the run. Pursued by the hit men, the father and son drive across the country to rural Montana, where a relative lives. They hope that the relative, a sheriff’s deputy (Jon Bernthal) married to a wilderness survival guide (Medina Senghore), can protect them. The hit men arrive and, in an effort to finish their assignment and cover their tracks, ignite a forest fire. Now everyone is running around in the woods, fighting each other, and also trying to escape the rapidly growing fire, and Hannah, again confronted by a raging inferno, will have an opportunity to redeem herself. And so on.
Sheridan’s better movies are, particularly in the case of Sicario, adept at getting the viewer to suspend disbelief. Those films may have had the minor plot holes or illogics endemic to thriller movies, but if they did, I was too gripped, too seduced, to notice. But Those Who Wish Me Dead is hokey. We don’t learn enough about most of the characters to care about them. There are too many moments in which the plot’s frayed edges show or B-movie melodrama rears or Sheridan’s commitment to gritty authenticity loses a battle to the reflexes of Hollywood. In one scene, Jolie’s character, a forest ranger living alone in a glorified treehouse without running water, takes off her shirt and is revealed to be wearing, of all things, a lacy white bra.
In recent years, the Western U.S. has suffered a series of terrifying and deadly wildfires, and last year, a nightmarish “megafire” consumed a large part of Australia. Despite that relevance, Those Who Wish Me Dead doesn’t seem especially interested in wildfires as a topic. The fire just feels like a plot device or a vehicle for obvious metaphors about being cleansed by fire. We don’t learn much about the lives of smokejumpers or about forest firefighting generally, which seems to be a shame.
The high-water mark of the neo-Western is probably still 2007’s No Country for Old Men, the Coen brothers’ faithful, sometimes word-for-word, adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, superbly cast and rendered with sublime mastery of mood and tone. That, too, involved a botched crime and a sociopathic hit man who goes to extraordinary lengths to destroy loose ends, as well as guns and explosions and innocents caught in the crossfire. It was, in some ways, a far wilder and more over-the-top film. But it felt original and alien and un-Hollywood, and if a movie doesn’t feel Hollywood, the viewer will gladly let it get away with almost anything.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
