100 min | R | May 14, 2021 | Warner Bros. Pictures
A smokejumper haunted by the people she failed gets stranded in a Montana fire tower with a boy two assassins want dead. The forest is burning toward all of them. The setup runs hotter than the movie.
Hannah Faber is a smokejumper who watched three people die in a fire she misjudged. Now she sits in a watchtower in the Montana wilderness, punished and waiting. A boy named Connor arrives with a target on his back and two hired killers behind him. His father knew something dangerous, and the men who want it buried will burn down a forest to finish the job. Taylor Sheridan builds this as a redemption story dressed up as a survival thriller, and the wilderness is the real engine of dread.
Angelina Jolie plays Hannah with a coiled, physical exhaustion that grounds the whole picture. She wears the guilt in her shoulders before she ever speaks it. Finn Little plays Connor with a numbness that reads as shock rather than precociousness, and the pairing avoids the usual orphan-and-warrior sentimentality. Jon Bernthal and Medina Senghore play a married deputy and his very pregnant wife, and Senghore gets the film’s best sequence as a woman who refuses to be a victim. Nicholas Hoult and Aidan Gillen play the assassins as polite functionaries, but the script gives them motive without menace and leaves both actors stranded.
Sheridan directs from a script he wrote with Michael Koryta and Charles Leavitt, and his command of landscape carries the threadbare plot. The fire is the standout craft element. Smoke creeps in as a slow suffocation before the flames arrive, and the sound design lets the wind and the crackle do the work that dialogue cannot. The lightning storm sequence stages real physical stakes against an indifferent sky. Sheridan stages action with weight, and bodies hit the ground hard.
This is a lean genre programmer that knows exactly what it is. The villains are too thin to fear and the conspiracy is a clothesline to hang the chase on. What works is the elemental simplicity of people running from fire and men. Sheridan trusts the mountain and the burn more than he trusts the script, and that instinct is correct.