The Contract (2006)
Directed by Bruce Beresford
No — The Contract is not woke, scoring 5 out of 100 on our wokeness meter.
The Contract arrives from 2006, a German-American action thriller directed by Bruce Beresford, a man whose filmography includes Driving Miss Daisy and therefore a certain credentialed interest in racial dynamics that this project declines to exercise.
Consciousness Markers
The central conflict involves a professional hit on a 'reclusive billionaire,' offering a very mild, indirect critique of corporate power and wealth.
While the film deals with systemic power structures (government/corporate hitmen), it does so through standard genre tropes without offering any deep or critical racial commentary.
The casting relies heavily on established, white action stars, with Morgan Freeman serving as a highly skilled, morally gray professional rather than a vehicle for progressive representation.
The female characters function primarily as plot mechanisms—a handler and a love interest—and do not challenge traditional gender dynamics or advance a feminist agenda.
The film is driven by action and suspense, lacking the didactic speeches or heavy social commentary required to meet a lecture energy threshold.
The film is a standard 2000s action thriller and contains no discernible LGBTQ+ themes or characters.
The wilderness setting is purely a backdrop for a pursuit and contains no environmental messaging or critique.
The film focuses entirely on action and plot mechanics, showing no interest in body image or diverse physical representation.
No characters exhibit traits related to neurodivergence, and the film does not attempt to explore such themes.
The narrative is entirely fictional and makes no attempt to re-examine or challenge established historical facts.
Why it received this score
The Contract arrives from 2006, a German-American action thriller directed by Bruce Beresford, a man whose filmography includes Driving Miss Daisy and therefore a certain credentialed interest in racial dynamics that this project declines to exercise. Morgan Freeman plays Frank Carden, a professional assassin, and John Cusack plays Ray Keene, a widowed gym teacher who takes his son into the woods and stumbles into a manhunt. The premise is sturdy. The execution went direct to video, where it has remained, unbothered, ever since.
There is a billionaire in the plot, Lydell Hammond Sr., a vocal opponent of stem cell research, and a shadowy handler named Miles who orders loose ends tied. This gestures at corporate power and the machinery behind it, though the film treats these as scenery for a chase. Alice Krige's Miles is a stern woman with a phone, which is the extent of the film's engagement with gender. Megan Dodds appears as Sandra, a woman caught in the crossfire who becomes a girlfriend by the closing barbecue. Neither figure disturbs the arrangement of things.
What remains is craft without conviction, a pursuit through Bulgarian mountains standing in for American wilderness, and a cast of white action professionals doing what they have always done. The film has no sermon to deliver and no congregation to address. It simply wants to move. In an era that increasingly demands its entertainments carry a message, this one carries a rifle and a set of keys, and considers the matter settled.
Analysis generated by our Consciousness Algorithm
Synopsis
Attempting to recover from a recent family trauma by escaping into the woods for a peaceful hiking trip, an ex-lawman and his young son stumble across a dangerous contract killer.
Questions about The Contract
Is The Contract woke?
No — The Contract is not woke, scoring 5 out of 100 on our wokeness meter. That earns it a verdict of Ultra Based.
Does The Contract have any woke elements?
Very few. None of the 10 markers reaches 30, the level where a marker counts as present; the highest is Eat the Rich at 20.
How does The Contract compare to other 2006 movies?
It ranks #132 of the 211 films from 2006 we've scored; their average is 11. The wokest is An Inconvenient Truth (92).
How is the Woke Score calculated?
An AI-assisted process researches the film and its reception, scores it 0–100 on ten markers, then combines those into one 0–100 Woke Score. It measures a specific set of 2020s cultural themes, not film quality.