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On July 1st Amazon released their new action thriller series – The Terminal List. It stars Chris Pratt s Navy SEAL Lieutenant Commander James Reece. He is the leader of a SEAL team on a mission that goes badly wrong. Most of his team gets wiped out. He gets back home and has conflicting memories about what happened, carrying a head injury after an explosion on the mission.
Some signals intelligence of his own radio transmission seems to contradict his memory of what happened. As new evidence comes to light, Reece discovers dark forces working against him, endangering not only his life but the lives of those he loves. It is based on the novel of the same name by Jack Carr.
Let’s deal with this up-front. I am sad to say I don’t think it’s that great. It’s no Reacher. I really, really wanted to like this show and was looking forward to it. However, I just find it dull and boring. It takes itself way too seriously, which is no surprise considering who the writer of the original source material is.
The action is just OK. Full of CG blood and loud booms. Yawn. Pratt is convincing in his weapons handling, of course. He is a known “gun guy” so I appreciate that. He takes the role very seriously, no doubt to do justice to the type of guy he is portraying. Unfortunately, that overly serious tone brings it down.
The Terminal List is full of faces and names you’d know if you were part of the gun world or the “tactical world”.
The author of the source material, Jack Carr, is a former Navy SEAL. Jared Shaw, who Pratt shadowed for his role in Zero Dark Thirty, acts in the show and has an extensive military background. In an interview about the show, Pratt said:
“We made sure each episode passed the “sniff test” with our trifecta of special operators, Jack, Jared, and Ray (Mendoza) another former SEAL and our military adviser- as well as Max Adams, our writer, who was a Ranger. Our mantra was: no Hollywood bullshit. Make it real.”
So maybe the effort to make them all appear to be super-alpha super-operators to stroke egos has hurt any chance this had of being a more enjoyable revenge thriller set in the world of the CIA and PsyOps.
Anyway, I would pass on it. It is a slog. It is too slow and overly complex to just enjoy, unless you are a big time Jack Carr lover.
I mean, Taylor Kitsch is in it ferchrissake, ‘Nuff said.
