Those Who Wish Me Dead brings Angelina Jolie back to survival action

📺 Surviving wildfire and hired killers: Those Who Wish Me Dead — now on Netflix — marks Angelina Jolie’s return to survival action. Directed by Taylor Sheridan and co-starring Jon Bernthal, Nicholas Hoult, Aidan Gillen, and Tyler Perry, the 2021 film stumbled at the box office in the aftermath of Covid-19 before finding its audience on streaming.

The plot: Hannah (Jolie) is a smokejumper working in the Montana wilderness, haunted by PTSD after failing to save children in a previous wildfire. She finds herself forced to protect young Connor (Finn Little), who is fleeing hired assassins sent to silence his father after he uncovers a political secret with the potential to upend the country. Hannah takes the boy under her wing, and the two must survive both the killers and the fire closing in around them.

What we liked: Jolie delivers a convincing performance that balances physical toughness with psychological fragility — steering away from the invincible action heroine and toward something more human: a character who makes mistakes and feels the weight of them. The villains, while cartoonishly evil in their one-dimensionality, are played with cold, unsettling precision — Hoult and Gillen in particular. Add to that Sheridan’s skill in using the brutality of nature as a structural element of the conflict, and you get something that recalls the survival action films that defined Hollywood in the 1990s.

What we didn’t necessarily like: The screenplay is thin in places, leaving the true motivations behind the assassination chain frustratingly unexplained — a gap that makes the plot feel incomplete. The characters’ psychological arcs move quickly and conventionally, lacking the depth the premise calls for, beyond a handful of recurring flashbacks that sketch Hannah's backstory. The film also relies at times on unlikely coincidences to bring characters together in a vast wilderness and keep the story moving.

Our verdict: This may not be the most polished or ambitious entry in the survival action genre, but it's a solid, fast-moving take on a classic format that will satisfy fans of action, wilderness survival, and Jolie specifically.

WHERE TO WATCH- The film is streaming on Netflix. Watch the trailer on YouTube (watch, runtime: 2:23).