The Contractor 4K 2022 Ultra HD 2160p

James Harper has dreamed of serving in the army since childhood, and the green beret has always been a source of pride to him. However, after being seriously wounded, he is suspended from service. He cannot find a place for himself among civilians, a situation only made more difficult by his medication. Soon he is given the chance to take up arms again, but it remains to be seen where to point it.

The Contractor 4K Review
James Reed (Chris Pine) is discharged from the U.S. Army without looking at his combat decorations or the President's own handshake - the drugs in his blood, which he takes for pain in his injured knee, are to blame. Left without a livelihood with a loan behind him, he accepts the offer of his comrade (Ben Foster) and gets a job in an underground CIA unit made up entirely of the same poor souls abandoned by the army. Except that on the first mission everything goes wrong, and for some reason James tries to be eliminated by his own people. All paths are cut off, there is nothing to do but fight for life in the hope of seeing his family again.

As you know, the crawfish is the fish. And in a state of total absence of any high-profile paintings and a mediocre (if not more) action movie with Chris Pine is quite a notable premiere. In any other case, though, it seems that The Mercenary should not have been mentioned: it is not for nothing that this film, which comes out even earlier in Russia than in its homeland, appeared on the screens without any marketing whatsoever. The actors in it are not the last ones to play in Hollywood (besides Pine, there's also Ben Foster, Kiefer Sutherland, Eddie Marsan and Gillian Jacobs), and the director's name at first intrigues: Tariq Saleh began his career with the unusual animation Metropia, then he directed episodes of Wild West World and Ray Donovan. But this doesn't help the film in any way: it comes out quietly, in a complete vacuum, and within a week its existence is likely to be forgotten by almost everyone who (un)luckily saw it.

Here, though, it's not all unequivocally bad. The first act of the film hints that it could turn out to be a very interesting movie - a quiet, almost silent drama about a soldier who is mired in gray everyday life and obsessions: in his spare time he disassembles and assembles a gun, climbs on the roof in the middle of the night to "fix" something and sadly deletes voice messages from collectors. "The Mercenary" at first moves somewhere in the direction of Kathryn Bigelow's "Lord of the Storm" and, while it offers nothing new on the subject of post-traumatic stress disorder, it does talentfully show the world through the eyes of a man who cannot find his place among the cozy suburban cottages. Saleh's uncomfortable directing especially helps here - his camera captures the characters as if with an overly mechanical, inanimate eye. This is probably how a person who exists "on automatic" perceives the reality around him.

But then everything breaks down. Once the film turns into an adrenaline-fueled thriller about a loyal soldier, all the weaknesses of "Mercenary" come out. It turns out that the very "uncomfortable" directing is not at all a deliberate artistic move, but a consequence of banal inexperience or even ineptitude. In the action scenes the characters are teleporting through the space from frame to frame, it is almost impossible to follow their movements because of the clumsy editing, and the banal scenes are designed very boring: people either fumble in a confined space or stand in the street and just shoot at each other, in one scene Chris Pine is running against a concrete wall while the enemies desperately can not hit him from a few meters. And even in perfectly calm dialogue scenes, Saleh breaks the rule of the camerawork "figure of eight" for some reason and constantly confuses the viewer with the way the characters are positioned relative to each other. Again, this doesn't look like a deliberate move, as in some of Takashi Miike's KinoProbe. It looks like a freshman mistake in VGIK.

Once the stakes are raised, it's clear that the film is also made up very lazily. Chris Pine's character is entirely defined by the coddled daddy issues - he just "doesn't want to be like his father," and all the secondary characters look more like video-game NPCs: they show up to give the protagonist a quest or lay out some exposition, then just as suddenly disappear. James Reed's adventures consist of him cosplaying the Ninja Turtles in a Berlin sewer, and the whole action culminates in a minute-long firefight, at the end of which the hero just walks in and finishes off an already wounded "boss." It is clear that any movie, if you want, can be described in such devaluing sentences and make it sound simpler than it really is. But in the case of The Mercenary, it sincerely seems to be written in such phrases: being a soldier is sad, the government lies, family is important.