Fire on the Mountain

I actually kind of liked Those Who Wish Me Dead (2021) - partly because I wasn't sure if it was supposed to be a comedy.

It starts out as two threads: a pair of cold assassins (Aiden Gillen and Nicholas Hoult) wiping out a judge in Miami, then heading for Jacksonville. These guys are so hard, so unemotional, that I suspected them of being some sort of comic relief: "You've got a spot of blood on your shirt there." 

In Jacksonville, dad Jake Weber sees the news on TV and takes off with his son Finn Little. They are headed to Montana.

Meanwhile, in Montana, smoke jumper Angelina Jolie is kidding around with her crew, but inside she's in bad shape. She saw some kids and a fellow firefighter die in a forest fire, and it haunts her. She gets stationed in a firetower, because being alone in the woods is the best way to get your head straight. We also meet her ex-boyfriend, Sheriff Jon Bernthal, and his pregnant wife Medina Senghore. It seems that Weber went to their survival school, and that's where he's headed.

But the bad guys have figured this out too, and manage to kill the dad, but the kid gets away. The assassins (who may not be as good at their jobs as you were lead to believe) have to get the kid to make sure that he doesn't have the McGuffin. So they set a forest fire to keep things stirred up.

They also go after Senghore, who gets away with some improvised weapons and a shotgun. Well, she runs a survival school. 

We're now about an hour in, and finally the kid meets up with Angelina Joli. They start walking to town through a lightning storm, but it still takes forever for them to see the fire. They turn around, but the assassins find them at the firetower - so they run, back into the fire.

From the promos, I had the idea that the whole movie took place in the fire - but it was only a bit at the end. It was very well done, and I guess a lot of it was really burning, not CGI (unlike the firetower, which was). So the best part wasn't actually very long. But all in all, not bad. The story was a little overstuffed, and the set up could have been brisker. Also, the dialog was pretty predictable. We had a game where we tried to predict it, and if we got it wrong, tried to decide if our line was better. 

This was written and directed by Taylor Sheridan (Wind River). It isn't as intense as that was, partly because the Montana setting was much more chill than the Wind River Rez. But there was at least one scene with Jolie getting beat up. Seeing her skinny beauty getting pummeled seems to get some people off.

And about that McGuffin: A few pieces of paper with some handwritten notes that could bring down some powerful men in politics and organized crime. Several commenters on IMDB and elsewhere were upset that we never find out what it is all about. I don't think they understand the concept of a McGuffin. What I was upset about is that it was in Jolie's pocket when she dived underwater. It might have even been in her coat pocket before she threw off her coat into the forest fire. I don't see how it survived. But the kid was getting ready for a press conference as the movie ended, so I guess it must have.