Angelina Jolie’s Return To Action In ‘Those Who Wish Me Dead’ Is Cause For Excitement

As Angelina Jolie makes her long-awaited return as an action hero in Taylor Sheridan’s Those Who Wish Me Dead, it’s a good time to take a look at why that’s cause for no small measure of excitement. Jolie is a descendent of Hollywood royalty (her parents are Jon Voight and Marcheline Bertrand, her godparents Maximillian Schell and Jacqueline Bisset), but when she emerged as her own thing – and the next big thing – in the mid-’90s, she was instantly branded as a tetchy, dangerous, punk rock party girl. Her portrayal of Gia Carangi in HBO’s Gia (1998), for which Jolie won both the Golden Globe and the SAG award, with the tagline “Too Beautiful to Die. Too Wild to Live” became the easiest, and broadest brush with which Jolie was popularly painted. Gia, a model who died of complications from AIDS, is a tragic figure made poetic by a culture that venerates beauty while being fascinated by the kind of recklessness it hypocritically condemns. Her sanguineous devotion to her first husband (and Hackers co-star) Jonny Lee Miller and then her second, Billy Bob Thornton, was made out to be the deviant perversions of some figment of a twisted collective fantasy. Wearing a vial of Billy Bob’s blood around her neck did more to exoticize her persona than Billy Bob wearing a vial of Jolie’s. 

Jolie became a bona fide action star with Gone in 60 Seconds, immediately followed by her shot at a studio tentpole franchise with video game adaptation Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and its sequel The Cradle of Life. It was while shooting the first of these pictures on location in Cambodia that Jolie learned about the poverty in this part of the world, inspiring her work as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations and eventually resulting in her adoption of a seven-month-old Cambodian refugee child (Rath Vibol, nee Maddox) in 2002. She subsequently adopted two more children from two other countries (Zaharia from Ethiopia in 2005 and Pax from Vietnam in 2006) and had three biological children with her ex-husband Brad Pitt. I remember her being criticized for “tourism” and her choice to adopt as akin to a famous, and vacuous, person acquiring fashionable accessories. The image of Jolie as merely a product of nepotism; as only the fortunate winner of the genetic lottery; as Gia the party girl, living fast and loose; and finally as just one half of this generation’s Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton power couple, has continued to color casual conversations about her. To my eye, Jolie has done an unusual amount of good with her power and wealth and yet for many she remains mercurial and, most unkindly, nuts.

The cruelty with which Jolie has been treated and the narrowness with which she’s been perceived extended to her first directorial efforts: the controversial Bosnian rape melodrama In the Land of Blood and Honey (2011) and then her fitfully successful biopic of Louis Zamperini Unbroken (2014). The consensus was that the things she had she didn’t deserve: her fame, her opportunities, even her successes. She attracts resentment. She hit her stride behind the camera with 2015’s By the Sea, however, a gorgeous, golden-lit, haunted journal of the plague years as an impossibly beautiful couple fall out of love in a landscape Thomas Mann might have imagined once. It’s a film that undermines her image as the epitome of empty celebrity and it recasts her doomed marriage to Pitt as not a Disney fairytale so much as a Grimm one. Her adaptation of Loung Ung’s First They Killed My Father in 2017, taking her back to Cambodia to recount a child’s experience of the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror, in the simplicity and clarity of its humanity, is easily one of the best films of that year.

In front of the camera, she became Maleficent in Disney’s prologue to Sleeping Beauty, the misunderstood villain in a frankly remarkable performance, one that I would call stunning. Maleficent engaged in a dialogue about a woman who has survived trauma, dedicating her life to the protection of an adopted daughter while dealing with the fallout from a horrific assault coded in the film as rape by a powerful patriarch. It’s hard not to see the role as personal for Jolie: a strong woman, cursed to look a certain way and taken advantage of by powerful men who define her narrative for a resentful populace ready to pigeonhole.

But Jolie is tough to formulate. She’s the troubled, chaotic Lisa in an Oscar-winning turn in James Mangold’s Girl, Interrupted – a version of poor Gia. My first impression of her though was as irrepressible, brilliant Kate from Iain Softley’s Hackers – a persona all lissome and dangerous that made her an instantly compelling action star in Doug Liman’s superlative Mr. & Mrs. Smith, Wanted and Salt. You realize it’s the same energy that fuels both kinds of performance: the Barbara Stanwyck melodrama on the one side, the Anne Baxter physicality on the other. Her presence is mesmerizing and she is among a very few actors in the United States who seem as well cast as a fire jumping forest firefighter, an Eternal in Chloe Zhao’s foray into the Marvel Cinematic Universe, or as various ordinary women thrust into heroism through extraordinary circumstance (Changeling, A Mighty Heart). For me, though, what I want for her most of all is the chance to direct her dream project, whatever it might be, because for all the advantages she’s had at the beginning, here at last, she’s earned it.

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is due in 2020. His monograph for the 1988 film MIRACLE MILE is available now.

Watch Those Who Wish Me Dead on HBO Max