Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Contractor’ on Paramount+, an Almost-Pedestrian Military Action-Thriller Starring Chris Pine

The Contractor (now on Paramount+) dishes up a not-at-all-unwelcome Chris Pine/Ben Foster Hell or High Water reunion, except this time, they play brothers not in blood but of another sort – military veterans, one who once saved the other’s life, taking on a big-payday private-contractor gig that ends up being exactly what you think it’s gonna be. Right: More Than They Bargained For. And by that token, will the movie be More Than We Might Expect From What Appears To Be A Standard-Issue Modern Action-Thriller? If we’re lucky.

THE CONTRACTOR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: James Harper (Pine) goes to church. Cleans his pistol. Teaches his young son Jack (Sander Thomas) to swim. Rides his motorcycle fast. Loves his wife, Brianne (Gillian Jacobs). Runs on the treadmill at the military facility. Ignores voicemails from debt collectors. Remembers when his father sat him down to get an American flag tattooed on his skinny, pre-adolescent shoulder. Promises Brianne that he’s not his father. And then he gets discharged, honorably. So honorably, he gets no pension or health insurance. See, he seriously injured his knee during combat and rehabbed and rehabbed and rehabbed so he could do a fifth tour of duty as a Green Beret for his country, but his country didn’t like that he took illegal steroids for his knee, and therefore unceremoniously discarded him. James sucks it up. He’s a military man and has no choice but to suck it up.

James is fixing the roof when it’s probably too dark to be up fixing the roof when Brianne comes home. Another guy is dead. One of his Army buddies. How? You know how. He wasn’t on rotation. He was at home. At the funeral, James runs into Mike Hawkins (Foster). We recognize Mike – we saw him in photos with James when they were overseas in fatigues. They must’ve been pretty tight. Mike invites him over to dinner at his very nice house where his sons play video games on a huge TV. They’re sipping a beer and we’re wondering how Mike affords this place when they start talking about what James is going to do now. Well, he’s going to join Mike on a “private security” detail for a very lucrative payday. It’s time to cash in, Mike says. They deserve it, don’t they?

James meets with Mike’s boss, Rusty (Kiefer Sutherland), on a heavily guarded rural ranch. “We import and export coffee,” Rusty says with a smile. Funny, how the coffee biz demands so many heavies with so much artillery. It’d be a two-, maybe three-week gig in Berlin, Mike would be there, and here’s a check for $50k. Thing is, James had promised Brianne he’d avoid such things. Shady deals. Dangerous. He lies and says he’ll just be “babysitting corporates” and then shows her the check. There’s a longshot chance that she believes him, but she probably doesn’t, and all she says is that he’ll miss Jack’s birthday. If only that was the worst of it. This job has is some real War on Terror shit – it requires burner phones and coded communiques, long hours and major hardware, surveillance of a scientist as he eats dinner with his wife and family. There’s definitely a look on James’ face like something doesn’t smell right but he trusts Mike and plows on ahead and when everything goes south and they end up gunning down cops and hiding out in a sewer and find themselves in an International Incident, well, we can’t say we didn’t see it coming, because it sure seems like James kind of did.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Contractor skims across similar psycho/social themes as The Hurt Locker, with some Bourne-isms in its action. But that’s being charitable – the movie is more along the lines of decent-but-vaguely-memorable War on Terror stuff like 13 Hours or Lone Survivor.

Performance Worth Watching: No one’s going to beef about the work put in by our two leads here, despite neither going against type – Foster as the guy whose fundamentally decent but maybe not 100 percent trustworthy, and Pine as the earnest man with good intentions who finds himself deeper in a moral morass than he’d like. They have rock-solid chemistry as foxhole brothers, and stir up enough subtext in their characters to give them some complexity and dynamics.

Memorable Dialogue: Mike sells James on the private-security gig – and dishes out a little foreshadowing: “We were trained to be ruthlessly adaptable. Use it.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: The Contractor aims to be a thriller with weighty political implications, a man-on-the-run action film, a friendship-in-the-trenches story and a character study about a soldier’s growing disillusionment. And this amalgam is perfectly acceptable and wholly unexceptional in its eminent watchableness, and if I sound like I’m hedging my commentary, well, the movie deserves no more or less. Director Tarik Saleh gives his primary cast just enough room to make their characters more than boilerplate hoo-rah boys and patriotic family men, directs action sequences with clarity and a modicum of excitement, and nurtures just enough suspense and investment in James’ survival to keep our eyes on the screen. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but I’m reasonably certain you have seen worse.

One thing we movie knowers like to harp on is tone. The Contractor is wildly successful at maintaining tonal consistency, namely, a kind of grim, suffocating seriousness. But it’s easy to suck the air out of a movie like this – far easier than it would be to leaven it with the type of color, comedy or poignancy that separates exceptional films from the perfectly acceptable ones.

I do, however, appreciate how this movie puts its character between the proverbial rock and a hard place: He’s a guy who spent his whole life knowing only one thing, soldiering, and finds himself in a quandary where he either can take great risk for great reward, or struggle to provide for his family. Of course, only one will satisfy the pressure he feels to be a wholly masculine man. There’s just enough substance to James, and Pine’s characterization, to render the film thoughtful in the spaces between its ever-intensifying scenes of high-stakes violence. There’s also just enough plot contrivances – e.g., how the pain in James’ knee frequently disappears mysteriously so he can win a fight or a foot chase, which maybe can be chalked up to adrenaline if we’re feeling overly charitable – to undermine the movie’s credibility. But such things aren’t a gamebreaker.

Our Call: The Contractor is relentlessly just fine. STREAM IT with modest expectations.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.