Chris Pine embodies the quintessential American action hero in The Contractor. The opening credits montage alternates between glimpses of James Harper (Pine), a U.S. Special Forces sergeant, working out before dawn, cleaning and reassembling his gun, and, of course, attending church with his wife, Brianne (Gillian Jacobs), and son, Jack (Sander Thomas). In the midst of prepping for another tour of duty, James, with his steely gaze, is ready to serve for all that is good and righteous about his homeland.
But, then, James is discharged for using an unauthorized medication to aid a chronic knee injury. With bills piling up and his family’s future hanging in the balance, James is introduced to the world of private contracting by his former SEALs chief, Mike (Ben Foster), as a way of making some substantial cash. In quick succession, the two friends arrive in Berlin, sent on a black ops mission by an enigmatic handler, Rusty (Kiefer Sutherland), to stop an ostensibly terrorist-funded scientist, Salim Mohsin (Fares Fares), from launching a biochemical threat.
Predictability sets in quickly here and stays the course. For one, it’s not hard to surmise that James and Mike’s operation is dubious at best, and as soon as James comes face-to-face with an innocence-pleading Salim, our protagonist starts to suspect that the scientist might not actually be working with the bad guys. And once James and Mike’s team successfully recovers the hard drive containing Salim’s research, they’re instantly split up by a sudden police ambush and James is forced to go on the run for much of the rest of the film.
With James desperately navigating a foreign city while evading both local authorities and mysterious assassins, director Tarik Saleh intermittently displays a knack for integrating the urban environment into The Contractor’s action. One particular shootout and chase sequence that begins on the streets and continues underground into Berlin’s sewer system evinces a tactile sense of space. That tactility was the strong suit of Saleh’s last feature, The Nile Hilton Incident, a tense neo-noir set amid the 2011 Egyptian revolution. But the geopolitical savvy of that film is nowhere to be seen in J.P. Davis’s hackneyed screenplay, which tosses off references to al-Qaeda and Syria with the same level of introspection as a Rambo sequel.
The Contractor does initially hit upon one potentially rich subject: the sorry treatment of war veterans by a United States government that once demanded so much from them. “We gave them our minds, our bodies, and our spirit. And they chewed us up and spit us out,” declares Rusty during one of many hoary, but well-intentioned, speeches throughout the film’s first act. It’s a variation on similar themes about America failing its working class that Pine and Foster previously mined in their previous collaboration, Hell or High Water, and both actors once again commit to their characters’ conflicting emotions of anger, confusion, and despondency.
Yet once this thesis is defined, Saleh’s film gives itself over to rote action-movie plotting. What subsequently transpires follows in the footsteps of many a Jason Bourne or Jack Ryan yarn before it, and is calibrated in a ponderously straight-faced way so as to give the whole thing some semblance of gravity. In the end, The Contractor jettisons most of its underlying interests to simply settle for an old-fashioned tale of a righteous tough guy trying to find a way home to his wife and son—two characters who are as interchangeable as any of the nameless henchman who James dispatches along the way.
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