PLOT: An off-the-books weapons designer for a shadowy government agency, Fitz (Jim Caviezel), who’s also an ex-Green Beret, goes to war with killer mercenaries hired by a shady company seeking to acquire vast amounts of land in his Wyoming hometown by any means necessary.
REVIEW: When the Jim Caviezel-led Sound of Freedom beat Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny at the North American box office a few years ago, you can bet that Hollywood took notice. Once something of a pariah due to his outspoken beliefs, the movie showed audiences were more than interested in a return to the big screen for this one-time star of The Passion of the Christ, and now here’s Ghost Soldier, a slick, meat-and-potatoes action film that aims to establish him as an older action star to compete with the likes of Liam Neeson.
While some may wonder if the film is slanted in any way politically, Ghost Soldier is pretty light on the politics. Sure, Fitz is a Christian and a patriot, but he’s openly wary of big corporations and the immense wealth gap, with the crux of the plot even revolving around an evil plan to build AI data centres. It’s really no more political than a Taylor Sheridan show, and should work for a broad, mainstream audience. It’s not Run, Hide, Fight, Infidels or Citizen Vigilante. This is a movie that should work for (mostly) everyone.
Ghost Soldier is actually a blast to watch. Action movies nowadays are bloated, but rising director Will Eubank (who also directed two other solid programmers, Underwater and Land of Bad) keeps this lean and mean, running a tight, efficient ninety minutes. It only takes moments for the plot to kick into high gear, with Caviezel’s Fitz fighting bad guys within minutes of being introduced. While shot on a modest budget for a studio film (it was bankrolled by Sony), Eubank makes it look like it cost many times its actual budget, with it featuring more per capita action than a lot of other bigger action flicks from recent years.
Caviezel seems to be having a ball as Fitz. Living off the grid, he’s prone to speech-making against the tyranny of man, which might be somewhat heavy-handed but is fun in the context of this movie. It’s a blast watching him take down bad guy after bad guy, starting with lower-rent mercenaries led by Garret Dillahunt, and escalating to some Bosnian bad guys led by Beau Knapp. The villains are cartoonish. I got a kick out of how every time they cut back to the CEO bad guy, we see his wife in the background taking a shot of vodka or popping pills. It’s not subtle, but this is the kind of movie that would be an absolute blast to watch with some friends and a couple of beers.
In that way, it’s more like an eighties or nineties action flick than anything modern, which to me makes it a rare treat. Caviezel cracks a lot of one-liners, with many of them having a bit of a religious inflection relating to how he’s about to send the bad guys to meet their maker. Caviezel looks good in the part, although he’s occasionally over-the-top, but even that doesn’t really hurt the movie, as it’s going for a certain heightened vibe.
Caviezel’s definitely giving the film his all, and the action is pretty well done, especially as far as the gunplay goes. The shooting is well choreographed, with weapons trainer Tetiana Dar (whose Instagram often shows her training movie stars like Caviezel, Samuel L. Jackson and Austin Butler in gunplay) even having a small role as one of the Bosnian mercenaries.
While it’s Jim Caviezel’s show, Eubank surrounds him with a fun supporting cast that will score with the movie’s genre audience. Olivia Thirlby gets a long-overdue post-Dredd return to action as the town sheriff who smells a rat. Genre mainstay Michael Ironside has a good part as the local gunsmith, who’s a father figure to Fitz, while Shea Whigham shows up as his shadowy but affable government employer (he’s the Trautman to Caviezel’s Rambo).
Do I have any reservations about Ghost Soldier? A few—for one thing, this movie is begging for an R rating, especially with Fitz a weapons designer who makes incredible devices meant to take out bad guys. When he deploys them in the climax, there should have been some gore. Not having it robs the film of some much-needed edge, although I would still say this is more violent than something a faith-based studio like Angel would put out. I also thought the hand-to-hand combat scenes paled next to the weapons-based ones, with too much quick cutting. Some of the smaller roles are also rather amateurishly acted, although this isn’t fatal, as it kind of adds to the B-movie vibe. I do feel, though, like if Sony had ponied up a bit more cash for Eubank, he could have made Ghost Soldier all the better. Even still, I had a really good time watching it, and seeing a meat-and-potatoes actioner like this hit theaters is always cause for celebration.
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