STAR RATING: ***** Brilliant **** Very Good *** Okay ** Poor * Awful
Special Forces sergeant James Harper (Chris Pine ) is involuntarily discharged from the military, suddenly ineligible for the benefits he thought he'd get. With a wife and son to support, and desperate for work, he turns to his friend, Mike (Ben Foster) who recommends some private contractor work for Rusty (Kiefer Sutherland), another disgruntled former soldier who believes the service owes him. On a routine assignment in Berlin, Harper discovers all is not as it seems, and must race against time to get to the bottom of it.
While in pre production, The Contractor was going under the working title of Violence of Action, before a last minute script rewrite was applied. So it's an interesting tidbit that it went from copying the title of a straight to DVD Steven Seagal film, to a straight to DVD Wesley Snipes one. And the end result is ultimately one as formulaic and unremarkable as one of the best from those two auteurs of the action genre, just a little glossier and finely tuned, but no less than the sum of its parts.
In spite of the banality of the story, it still seems to be aiming to be something higher, with frequent flashbacks of Harper's father when he was a kid, conditioning him to think and act like a soldier, as well as the general theme of soldiers struggling to adjust to civilian life. It's all pretty flat and humourless, shot in the dull, grey lighting that is typical of many modern films. Performances wise, Pine has a reliable presence in a tough guy role, while Sutherland applies a raging Jack Bauer like intensity as the guy in charge, but neither can lift the dull material any higher than it is.
Director Tarek Saleh helms a cookie cutter action film that is passable at best, with pretensions above its station, but without anything genuinely striking to back them up. **
Special Forces sergeant James Harper (Chris Pine ) is involuntarily discharged from the military, suddenly ineligible for the benefits he thought he'd get. With a wife and son to support, and desperate for work, he turns to his friend, Mike (Ben Foster) who recommends some private contractor work for Rusty (Kiefer Sutherland), another disgruntled former soldier who believes the service owes him. On a routine assignment in Berlin, Harper discovers all is not as it seems, and must race against time to get to the bottom of it.
While in pre production, The Contractor was going under the working title of Violence of Action, before a last minute script rewrite was applied. So it's an interesting tidbit that it went from copying the title of a straight to DVD Steven Seagal film, to a straight to DVD Wesley Snipes one. And the end result is ultimately one as formulaic and unremarkable as one of the best from those two auteurs of the action genre, just a little glossier and finely tuned, but no less than the sum of its parts.
In spite of the banality of the story, it still seems to be aiming to be something higher, with frequent flashbacks of Harper's father when he was a kid, conditioning him to think and act like a soldier, as well as the general theme of soldiers struggling to adjust to civilian life. It's all pretty flat and humourless, shot in the dull, grey lighting that is typical of many modern films. Performances wise, Pine has a reliable presence in a tough guy role, while Sutherland applies a raging Jack Bauer like intensity as the guy in charge, but neither can lift the dull material any higher than it is.
Director Tarek Saleh helms a cookie cutter action film that is passable at best, with pretensions above its station, but without anything genuinely striking to back them up. **