Despite the fact that it shares its title with a Wesley Snipes direct-to-DVD offering from 2007, I remained cautiously optimistic about The Contractor. It seemed to have a lot going for it, especially its reunion of leads Chris Pine and Ben Foster, both of whom had previously starred in the highly affecting Hell or High Water back in 2016. Also, right off the bat, it seemed like it had many interesting plot points to explore. In other words, it had a lot of shots to fire, metaphorically speaking. Unfortunately for its audience, not a single one of those shots ended up striking its target.

For the first 20 minutes or so of The Contractor, we’re introduced to James Harper (Chris Pine), a veteran Army Ranger soldier who’s only just recovered from a major knee injury. Harper is a family man with a loving wife and a growing son, and like many Americans, he’s chest-deep in debt. But more interestingly, he relies on painkillers and steroids to “stay on the team”. Sadly for Harper, his drug-use gets him booted from the Army when a fresh-faced officer “cleans house” in his unit. Boom, this movie fires its first shot, its first intriguing plot point to explore. How is a special forces soldier dependent on drugs going to survive without his medical benefits? And even more so, how will this affect him when the action inevitably kicks into high gear?

Because of his debt, Harper is desperate for cash and seems reluctantly set on mercenary work, despite his wife’s protestations. At an old buddy’s funeral, he runs into Mike (Ben Foster), another old buddy who also happens to be heavily involved in “private contracting” and is willing to recommend Harper to his boss Rusty, played by Kiefer Sutherland. This is where the film gets even juicier, with our hobbled lead sitting down face-to-face with bearded Jack Bauer to discuss “honorable” mercenary work, this time an operation involving a corrupt virologist in Berlin. Bang, another plot shot fired. A virologist with terrorist links developing a weaponized strain of H1N1 influenza? Sign me up, I like where this is heading.

Alas, this is where The Contractor starts to go off the rails, even if those watching don’t know it yet. If you’ve seen the overly-revealing trailer, you know that the op goes sideways and Harper finds himself on the run, perhaps even double-crossed by the very company that hired him. We’ve all seen this movie before, the one in which a skilled soldier-type has to fight off waves of bad guys while also investigating what the hell is happening. This isn’t so bad though, given that it’s the kind of story we came to see, right? Well, I have no doubt that some viewers will like it, but I couldn’t help but notice that the film started to ignore all of its more interesting elements at this point. Its shots were starting to veer wide.

First and foremost, Chris Pine’s character is pretty much all the movie focuses on from here on out, which is a shame when you have Foster and Sutherland on the payroll. It’s not that Pine is offensively bad in any way, but his character is bland, with his most defining trait being… that he has a bad knee? Sure, he’s brave and can kick ass, but so can pretty much every other protagonist in every other action movie. Ben Foster was at least bringing a bit of depth with his similarly ill-defined ex-soldier character, with his dead eyes being especially powerful. Pine tries his best with the material, but I found myself caring about him less and less as the story trudged forward. There’s really not even a primary villain to juxtapose against his character, which certainly would’ve helped.

Maybe I’m being too critical of The Contractor’s lead character. After all, Jason Bourne wasn’t exactly a fount of charisma, but then again, his films were expertly plotted (at least the first three were). This film’s plot is notably less well-executed, or rather, it’s almost non-existent at a certain point. This is where I come back to the dumb “plot shots” metaphor I’ve been using in this review. An example of that is the virologist/biological weapon subplot, which is ignored for a bit, before the movie loops back around to it toward the end. The answers we receive about the villains and their motivations are sparse, to say the least. Yet those answers are actually quite compelling, and I found myself imagining how they could’ve been explored in greater detail. Given that the film runs only a little over 95 minutes before its credits roll, this plotline definitely could’ve been expanded upon.

Rather, most of the runtime after the first half-hour is dedicated to Chris Pine surviving shootouts and hand-to-hand battles. And there’s the requisite time given to him limping around on his jacked-up knee, but luckily for him, it doesn’t seem to affect him all that much when the baddies are around. This is a major missed opportunity, as it would’ve been way more engaging watching him fend off henchmen on only one good leg, or while dealing with the devastating effects of painkiller withdrawal.* Still, the action scenes are somewhat compelling, with a few decent gunfights and close-quarter scraps that occasionally move the needle. I enjoyed the final shootout and how relentless it was, and there’s a hand-to-hand fight in a sewer that got my blood going. I would’ve preferred punchier violence overall, but what we got is above average these days.

All in all, the prevailing thought I had when The Contractor ended was that it was heavily edited in post. Too much is missing plot-wise for any other conclusion to be drawn, and because of this, I found/find myself thinking more about what could have been rather than what was actually shown. It’s never good when your audience starts pondering things like: Why didn’t they take that storyline in this direction when it’s so obvious? How did character A know character B? Wait, how did the villains find this place? C’mon, does Ben Foster really drive from Atlanta to some western desert region for work?

As I said, all the “shots” this movie fires end up missing their target, but not because they were aimed in the wrong direction. Rather, it’s because there wasn’t enough powder to get them downrange. In other words, The Contractor broaches a bunch of interesting topics, but fails to explore any of them in a meaningful way. In contrast, the action is mostly passable and some of the film’s themes, like the way our veterans are treated, are incredibly worthwhile. Despite its good intentions, The Contractor is never able to come together and ends up a misfire. It’s clear that the studio also came to the same conclusion well before its release, when it changed its title and moved it to on-demand. But hey, at least it’s better than anything Wesley Snipes did circa 2007.

If I had to score it, I’d give The Contractor a 4/10.

Notes:

* To be fair in regard to the knee injury stuff, it does play into and increase the film’s tension a bit, but it could’ve easily heightened said tension even more with better utilization of it as a plot device.