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If “Walk Hard” was the parody that made it harder to take seriously subsequent music biopics, “MacGruber” did the same for a certain subset of action movies. Directed by William Eubank (“Underwater”), “Ghost Soldier”
stacks up one-man-army cliches as early as the opening credits and continues as if no one’s ever told the story of an individual with a certain set of skills defending the sovereignty of blue-collar Americans from deep-pocketed and unscrupulous foreign interests.
Jim Caviezel, who’s increasingly made himself a Hollywood representative for politically conservative ideologies with projects like “Infidel” and “Sound of Freedom” (not to mention a series of faith-based projects that began with “The Passion of the Christ”), does little to dispel that association as this film’s tireless, technologically advanced and morally upright title character. But Eubank’s glossy direction, paired with a merciless urgency (and complete lack of originality) in Chris Papsadero’s script, renders the story’s ripped-from-the-headlines details with too little dimensionality even for it to deliver the satisfaction of a good, bloody B-movie.
Caviezel plays Henry “Fitz” Fitzgerald, a former Special Forces soldier who retires to Valentine, Wyoming to live in relative anonymity while still designing advanced weapons for DARPA, the Department of Defense’s research and development agency. When “water monetization” company Brownstone begins buying up land around Midwest rivers and lakes for sale to AI companies for their data centers, its CEO (Mido Hamada) instructs his U.S. representative Ty Bell (Alexej Manvelov) to apply pressure — financial or physical — to coerce holdouts in Valentine.
Using enforcers Graves (Garret Dillahunt) and McNeil (Ricky Whittle), Bell tries to bully the nearby Hernandez family into yielding their property, first by declaring eminent domain and later by setting their home on fire. After befriending the Hernandez’ young son Jack (Cameron Gayden), Fitz steps in to protect them using a variety of cutting-edge weapons he has stored in a bunker below his own home. After Graves realizes that the former soldier will present a bigger problem even than his armed “security team” can handle, Brownstone sends in a well-trained group of mercenaries led by Mirko (Beau Knapp) to flush him out and deliver the remaining parcels of land. Aided by gun dealer Garry (Michael Ironside) and a sheriff, Heidi (Olivia Thirlby), who ran afoul of corrupt local leadership, Fitz announces plans to exact vengeance against bloodthirsty Mirko and drive Brownstone out of Valentine permanently.
Released Stateside on Veterans Day, “Ghost Soldier” clearly aims to pay tribute to America’s servicemen and women, and Papasadero’s script firmly sides with hard working citizens who too often in real life get crushed by the money and muscle of corporate interests. But even if the family Fitz is protecting from Blackstone is a Latino one whose patriarch died in combat, the film unnecessarily tries to generate patriotic sentiment by making the company’s CEO a ruthless Bahranian who doesn’t hesitate to bring in bloodthirsty soldiers to commit an extrajudicial killing or 10 in order to achieve his avaricious goals.
Such xenophobic dog whistles might be common (or even expected) in productions from The Daily Wire, but it’s more surprising in a wide release from Sony Pictures. But then again, nothing else in the film has been thought through in any depth, so such details feel more like the most direct means to an end — in other words, instantly establishing good versus evil — than an attempt to make an actual political statement.
Instead, the movie opens with dialogue in which Fitz in spoken of in comically hushed tones (“there’s only one guy for this task”) and then abdicates all other character development in service of making him seem like the ultimate badass. Strictly speaking, there’s nothing wrong with that, but most of what makes Fitz such an effective soldier is his arsenal of futuristic gear, from night vision goggles to clothing that camouflages him in plain sight to bullets that bend around objects, splinter into explosive fragments or use homing devices to hit their targets. That bag of tricks makes him more like Iron Man than a righteous, proletariat-defending warrior, and it undermines what, again, seems designed at least in part to be a rousing paean to those who serve.
The further problem is Caviezel, who successfully sells his role as a super-soldier but fails to inject any deeper humanity in Fitz beyond the fact that he befriends a young boy. In retrospect, it feels like Terrence Malick figured out his appeal back in “The Thin Red Line,” at least as far as military roles are concerned: He’s a cipher, a silhouette for the audience to project their feelings upon. That certainly helps amplify Fitz’s drive, focus and intensity, but what he achieves in the film’s inevitable conclusion feels less like justice than retribution — which rings hollow.
Remarkably, Eubank assembles a fairly impressive ensemble of character actors, including Dillahunt, Knapp, Ironside and Thirlby, as well as Shea Whigham as Fitz’s government liaison and Jaina Lee Ortiz as Jack’s widowed mom Sophia. Unfortunately, as either his friend or foe, they have little to do except fear or admire him. At 90 minutes, “Ghost Soldier” doesn’t have the patience or interest to populate Fitz’s world with anything but victims, worshippers or targets, which is unfortunate because it ends with the implication that the film’s distributor would love to expand his saga into a larger universe where he’s dropped into international conflicts to single-handedly resolve them.
There are, of course, dozens of stories — single-serving or franchise-built — about soldiers brandishing their skill set off the battlefield, so one more doesn’t materially impact that well-established canon. But the ones that endure are the ones that elicit an audience response, be it excitement, empathy or even tragedy. By comparison, “Ghost Soldier” has the spontaneity of a training exercise that’s been run too many times.
