What the show fails to reckon with is just how deranged Reece’s mission ends up being, his methods often hewing closer to those of Jigsaw (a torture scene involving intestines is as gratuitous as it is stupid) and quite often possessing not an iota of interest in how many other, innocent lives could be affected. When spread across eight, punishingly dull episodes, all of its many, many cracks star to tear the whole thing apart.ĭrably directed in part by Antoine Fuqua (who, since Training Day, has specialised in anonymous point-and-shoot action fodder), it’s astonishingly pedestrian and aggressively unexciting stuff, a flat and all-too-easy-to-predict revenge saga that plays by the basest of rules, our embittered hero violently working his way through the bad guys like he’s in a video game, all the way up to the boss level (hilariously he does cross them off on a hand-written list which allows for the unintentionally incredible line: “Stay off my list!”). The Terminal List is the kind of straight-to-Redbox three-beers-deep actioner made by the dozen, usually starring Chad Michael Murray or Bruce Willis or Chad Michael Murray and Bruce Willis, that works best with little to no thinking time. What’s most head-scratching about this reasoning, which has oftentimes turned good stories into great ones, is just how much this particular tale suffers from the long-form format. In a recent interview, Pratt, who on the same press tour has shown understandable annoyance over Twitter voting him “the worst of the Chrises”, revealed that the allure of a return to television was the ability to see a story that would have felt rushed and shallow at 90 minutes get the expansive eight-hour treatment, allowing ancillary characters depth and development. Upon returning back to his family (an adoring wife and a young daughter he takes hunting) memories of what happened shift and Reece convinces himself that some sort of conspiracy is afoot, one that might threaten the lives of those that he loves. Pratt plays James Reece, whose life is turned upside down after his platoon of Navy Seals is killed during a botched mission overseas. But it’s familiar to a fault, a tired and tiring series unfurling on Independence Day weekend for those looking for a low-stakes post-barbecue watch, a slab of barely heated red meat that’s all extremely hard-to-chew gristle. The Terminal List is an inevitable algorithmic amalgamation of the above with The Tomorrow War’s Chris Pratt heading up an adaptation of a Jack Carr novel, whose military adventures file next to both Clancy and Child, writers he’s expressed admiration for. It’s not all been bad per se but it’s mostly been indistinctive, a gung-ho formula of guys and guns that offers very little in the way of surprise. For it’s the red-blooded, dad-would-like action narratives that seem to have connected the most, from the long-running success of Bosch to the much-watched Tom Clancy adaptations Jack Ryan and Without Remorse to the impressive numbers for the army v aliens thriller The Tomorrow War to, most recently, the record-breaking viewership of Lee Child’s Reacher (one could superficially nestle The Boys alongside for those who haven’t quite grasped the show’s pretty easy-to-grasp satire).
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