In desperate times, the price to overlook your scruples and ignore that voice of doubt in your head moves from the impossibly high to the compromisingly real. For Jack Harper (Chris Pine), a check for $50,000 to participate in a seemingly easy, private military operation — with more cash to follow once the mission is complete — is enough for him to sign on with no questions asked, if only to keep collection agencies off his front porch. But as the old adage goes, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Such are the moral and ethical complexities of “The Contractor,” a thriller of divided ambitions, that earnestly wants to Say Something Important about the mistreatment of combat veterans by the very government that sends them to war, while also flirting with the opportunity for franchise potential, resulting in a film distinctly cleaved in two, unsatisfying halves.
The first half puts us in the shoes of Jack Harper, a Special Forces Agent as square-jawed as his name, and as reliably heroic as Captain James T. Kirk and Steve Trevor. Played with blue-eyed patriotism by Chris Pine (who also executive produced the film), he’s a god-fearing, model soldier who brushes up on Farsi in his spare time, and has completed four tours in five years, including in both Iraq and Afghanistan. All he has to show for it are endless bills, one busted lung, and a shredded knee. But when a drug test reveals the illicit substances that he’s been using to keep up his fighting form, Jack’s new, rigid Commanding Officer quickly issues an Honorable Discharge, revoking his pension and benefits in the process.
It’s an ignominious and unfair end to Harper’s military career, and with debts piling up, he worries about providing for his wife Brianne (Gillian Jacobs) and son Jack (Sander Thomas). Reuniting with his best friend and former superior officer Mike (Ben Foster) at a funeral for a former colleague, Chris is encouraged to join the world of private military contracting. It has certainly paid off for Mike, whose tidy, catalog-ready suburban home stands in stark contrast to Jack’s shambling abode, whose roof has seen better days. Despite Brianne’s reservations, Jack goes ahead and meets Mike’s boss Rusty (Kiefer Sutherland), and soon finds himself agreeing to go to Berlin for a straightforward, precise interrogation and extraction job. Mike will be along for the ride, and the zeroes staring up at Jack from the check cut by Rusty are hard to ignore. Naturally, everything ends up going sideways.
Fleeting appearances by Fares Fares and Nina Hoss signify the second-half shift of “The Contractor” as it moves from a character study of a career soldier left adrift by his country to an actioner chasing the shadow of the Bourne series. After the mission goes wrong, Jack is left injured, isolated, and betrayed in Berlin trying to piece together why he’s now an inconvenient loose thread in the middle of a vaguely-defined conspiracy involving flu vaccines (timely!). The film soon settles into a dull groove of chase and fight sequences that all cheapen whatever “The Contractor” might want to say about military interventionism by Americans abroad. Instead, it fumblingly repositions Jack as a man on a furrowed-brow mission to bring ethics to the world of military contracting, or expose its corrupt heart, all while murdering a bunch of people just like him in the process. It’s not particularly coherent, and Jack would be hard-pressed to explain his motivations to Brianne, but since she more or less vanishes from the movie anyway, he doesn’t have to worry about that.
Throughout “The Contractor” there is an air of rigorous yet forgettable competence. Director Tarik Saleh (“The Nile Hilton Incident”) acquits himself well in his first job with an A-list actor. The action sequences are clear-eyed and well-executed if workmanlike, and cinematographer Pierre Aim accomplishes the objective of contrasting picket-fence America with the grimier corners of Berlin. But straining through it all is a reach that Saleh can’t grasp, a film aching to present big ideas and a rich discourse that just isn’t found in the screenplay by J.P. Davis. “The Contractor” shows its hand with a bullet-riddled and blood-splattered climax, choosing spectacle over substance, and an ending that nudges a door open for Jack Harper to return in another installment, playing a similar role to another famous ex-soldier — Jack Reacher.
The indecisive nature of “The Contractor” makes one wish it had picked a lane — ridiculously swole punch-em-up or domestic study of governmental negligence of those who courageously serve their country. But the straight-to-streaming release of this promising-on-paper, A-list-led action flick, buoyed by arthouse favorites in supporting roles, should’ve been a tipoff — indeed, some things are too good to be true. [C-]