The Terminal List: Dark Wolf is a prequel to The Terminal List’s opening series, which saw a conspiracy uncovering Chris Pratt, a Navy SEAL hero suffering from suspected PTSD, carve out his spot as an everyman action hero by targeting the scheming government higher-ups who had put his buddies in danger.
There is a target audience for tub thumping shoot-out action romps like this, and I’m pretty sure I’m not it. At least that’s what I thought. But dig behind a script littered with buddy-bonding platitudes – “our job is protecting our boys” – and there’s just a hint of subversion sneaking through between the interminable hail of bullets.
The format is not too different in this prequel, which stars Taylor Kitsch as maverick Navy SEAL Ben Edwards, a supporting character in the opening series. Edwards is a loose cannon on a short fuse, to say the least, and his story follows him evolving – if that’s the word – from die-hard military guy to covert CIA operative.
Yet under his wild-haired bluff bravado, he’s a sensitive guy. We know that because he quotes Wilfred Owen’s war poetry. That’s a pretty clichéd shorthand, so it’s to Kitsch’s credit that he turns Edwards from a two-dimensional action hero into something resembling a complex human being, a character able to transcend the jingoistic banality of the script he’s been landed with.
Navigating the maze of backstabbing and hidden agendas, which leave him with no one left to trust as he and his ever-dwindling band of trusted sidekicks bid to defuse Iran’s nuclear threat – it’s not specified, but we’re rolling back a decade or so here – Kitsch brings a subtlety to his anti-hero swagger that Pratt lacked in the opening salvo.
The bar is raised. While there’s more than enough blood-letting and bang-bang stuff to satisfy an audience reared on shooter video games, there’s also an agenda that scratches away at the scars of global power politics and the mixed-up mess that conflicting zones of interest create.
That agenda occasionally gets buried by dollops of self-justifying claptrap (“the world is gonna be safe because of our actions”), but when Dark Wolf takes aim at big government, it hits the target.
There are caveats: take a sip of whisky for every time a macho guy calls another macho guy “brother”, and even the most hardened drinker might struggle to get past the end of episode two before conking out. You might feel you’ve stumbled into a lost series of Race Across the World given how often the shifting venues from Tehran to Tel Aviv by way of Zurich and Munich flash up on the screen. It’s geographically bamboozling.
But credit where it’s due. Kitsch is a diverting anti-hero, morphing from fraternity-embracing band of brother to an “every man for himself” everyman. Thanks to him, The Terminal List: Dark Wolf has just enough brain to compensate for its overdose of gun-toting brawn.
The Terminal List: Dark Wolf is on Prime Video now
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