Those Who Wish Me Dead

"Director and screenwriter Taylor Sheridan is an excellent teller of modern westerns, usually with questionable characters set in arid environments - be they icy ('Wilderness') or desert ('At Any Cost', 'Sicario'). In 'Those Who Wish Me Dead', Sheridan takes direction and script in a quiet town, without any of these apparent geographical features, to talk about a boy fighting for his life after his father's murder by two professional killers (Nicholas Hoult and Aidan Gillen). Help comes in the form of a firefighter (Angelina Jolie, returning to action films) who guides the boy through the forest and, at one point, through the flames of a forest fire. Unlike his other work as a filmmaker, the interesting 'Wilderness', Sheridan ends up betting on clichés and easy solutions for some things - the ease of tracking, the storm that breaks the communicator and the like. But even if it's not Sheridan's most interesting work, 'Those Who Wish Me Dead' makes an impact with a plot that holds attention with a typical "cat and mouse" chase. This also goes for Jolie's good performance in a role with layers, and for Gillen ('Game of Thrones'), a good villain."