110 min | R | April 30, 2021 | Amazon Studios
A Navy SEAL loses everything to a Russian hit squad and goes hunting for the men who pulled the trigger. Michael B. Jordan throws himself into every fight scene like he believes in the movie. The movie does not return the favor.
John Kelly is an elite Navy SEAL who comes home from a mission and gets targeted by a Russian death squad. The attack takes his wife and unborn child. He survives. The rest of the film follows him as he tracks the killers up the chain toward the men who gave the order. The plot dresses itself as a conspiracy thriller. It is a revenge story wearing a flag, and it spends most of its energy setting up a franchise that has not earned the right to exist yet.
Michael B. Jordan plays John Kelly with full physical commitment. He moves like a man who trained for the part and means it, and the grief reads on his face even when the script gives him nothing to say. Jodie Turner-Smith plays Karen Greer with a clipped authority that the film never develops. Jamie Bell plays Robert Ritter as a slippery CIA operator whose loyalties stay deliberately vague. Guy Pearce plays Secretary Thomas Clay with a calm that telegraphs the twist long before it arrives. Jordan carries the weight alone because the people around him are written as plot functions.
Stefano Sollima directs the action with hard surfaces and grey light. The standout sequence puts Kelly inside a sinking airplane fuselage filling with water, and Sollima shoots it in long takes that let the panic build. The screenplay by Taylor Sheridan and Will Staples gives the set pieces no connective tissue. Sheridan writes terse men in cold rooms, and that economy works in the prison and interrogation scenes. It collapses whenever the film tries to explain its own conspiracy. The score pushes patriotic swell into moments that have not done the work to deserve it.
This is a competent machine assembled from spare parts of better movies. The Cold War paranoia feels imported from 1985 with no irony about it. Kelly’s mission ends not with resolution but with a mid-credits scene announcing the sequel the whole project was built to sell. Jordan deserves a character. He gets a delivery system for a brand.