The Contractor (2022)

The Contractor arrives dressed as an action thriller and spends much of its runtime apologizing for the costume. Chris Pine plays a discharged Green Beret who, having wrecked his knee and his benefits, signs on with a private military outfit run by a genial Kiefer Sutherland. What follows is a competent manhunt across Germany, Romania, and assorted storm drains, punctuated by gunfire and the slow realization that the men signing the checks are not to be trusted. The picture is at its most comfortable when Pine is running. It is least comfortable when it stops to explain itself.

That explanation concerns the private contracting industry and a pharmaceutical company eager to acquire a vaccine that a Middle Eastern scientist, Salim, intends to give away for free. This is a real critique aimed at real targets, and the film delivers it with the enthusiasm of a man reading a memo he did not write. Salim is first presented as an Al-Qaeda bio-terrorist, then revealed as a humanitarian, a reversal the screenplay treats as a twist instead of a subject. The sermonizing about contractor greed and the military-industrial complex surfaces in bursts and then retreats, as though embarrassed by its own convictions.

Elsewhere the ledger stays spare. The cast is white and male by default, with women present mainly as debts to be repaid and a wife to return to. The film has no interest in climate, in queer lives, in body politics, in neurodivergence, or in rearguing history. Its camera cares about injury and combat fitness. A modest, workmanlike effort with a faint anti-corporate streak and no curiosity beyond the next firefight, it drew mixed notices and modest grosses and has since been quietly filed away. A serviceable evening, culturally speaking, with very little to classify.