103 min | R | April 1, 2022 | Paramount Pictures
A Special Forces sergeant gets discharged without a pension and takes a private contract he should refuse. The money is good. The job goes wrong in the first twenty minutes, and the movie spends the rest of its time looking for the thriller it forgot to build.
James Harper is an Army Special Forces sergeant. A failed drug test ends his career and strips his pension and benefits. Drowning in debt with a wife and son to support, he takes a private contract from a shadowy outfit run by an old comrade. The job in Berlin collapses fast and turns him into a man hunted by the same people who hired him. Tarik Saleh frames this as an indictment of how the country uses up its soldiers and discards them, then loses that thread in favor of standard man-on-the-run mechanics.
Chris Pine plays Harper with a banked, interior quality that suits a man who has spent his life following orders. He underplays the desperation and lets it surface in small gestures rather than speeches. Ben Foster plays Mike Hawkins, the friend who pulls Harper into the contract, with an easy warmth that curdles as the stakes rise. Kiefer Sutherland plays Rusty Jennings, the contractor recruiter, as a soft-spoken patriot whose menace lives under a smile. Eddie Marsan appears briefly as Virgil and sketches a full character in a handful of scenes.
Saleh directs from a script by J.P. Davis that wants to be a thriller and a message movie at once. The Berlin sequences are shot in cold blues and grays that drain the action of warmth and keep the violence clinical rather than thrilling. Saleh stages the central operation in near silence and lets the procedure do the work, which is the film at its best. The problem is structural. The first act builds a real argument about veterans and abandonment, then the back half abandons that argument for chases and reversals that any genre picture could supply.
The Contractor has the cast and the craft to be more than it is. The pieces never assemble into either the thriller or the protest the film keeps gesturing toward. Pine and Foster commit to a story that does not earn their commitment. The result is a competent military thriller that sands its own ideas down until nothing cuts.