She’s always been an A-lister. But her new film, Those Who Wish Me Dead, reflects Hollywood’s impulse to stifle female action heroes once they hit a certain age.
Early in the action thriller Those Who Wish Me Dead, Angelina Jolie’s character, Hannah, straps on a parachute and hops onto the back of a pickup truck. As the vehicle snakes through the Montana wilderness, she deploys her gear and lifts off, laughing as she glides back down. Hannah’s a smoke jumper—a trained firefighter who drops into wildfires from above—and she’s clearly tough as hell.
Yet that’s about as much excitement as she gets in the film, which debuted yesterday on HBO Max and in theaters. Those Who Wish Me Dead, based on the 2014 Michael Koryta novel and directed by Taylor Sheridan, marks Jolie’s return to the action genre after more than a decade away. At first glance, the film seems fit for the actor’s reentry. The story follows Connor (played by Finn Little), a boy on the run from assassins, who encounters Hannah after he witnesses his father’s murder. Hannah, still traumatized from her failure to stop a blaze that killed a group of hikers, vows to get him to safety before a forest fire wipes out the area. From the posters and trailers, Jolie appears to be the star, with Hannah serving as the emotional center of the ludicrous but propulsive story.
Instead, Jolie’s more of an ensemble player; for an action star, she sees little action. While other characters fight and show off their survival skills, Jolie spends most of her screen time hiking or crouching in the shadows with her pint-size companion. It’s a letdown to see Jolie limited by the thin role, and to see the film continue a Hollywood trend of diminishing her, and other older female action performers’, potential in the genre.