Review of The Terminal List

If The Punisher was written by a Navy SEAL...

Amazon’s The Terminal List is wildly popular yet widely panned by critics, judging by the Tomatometer, which proves again to be an indicator of watchability. Based on the novel by former SEAL Jack Carr, The Terminal List pits SEAL James Reece (Chris Pratt) on a straightforward revenge quest - he’s crossing names off his list, simple as that … at first.

Where the show really shines is in adapting Carr’s first-hand knowledge of special forces combat to this revenge story. The SEAL afficionado will be satisfied with all the little details screaming authenticity.

For example, early on Reece sees an occupied car outside his house, watching, as he arrives home with his wife. He sends her to the front door as bait, taking advantage of the distraction to circle into the driver’s blind spot and present his gun to the back of an unwitting skull. It seems like he’s putting his wife in danger but no! He hovers above that 5D chessboard preparing the ground for instant checkmate. His wife, knowing him well, follows his orders without question. It’s quite a touching scene in a way Hollywood writers couldn’t imagine - they’d wring their hands over perceived misogyny, put the wife in the Matrix, stuff like that.

A lot of simple, awesome examples: the way Reese holds his gun tight against his chest made this civilian ponder It didn’t look cool, but I was shown why he’s doing it - denying potential enemies around the corner any opportunity to grab his barrel. Once you realize, it looks cooler than anything.

The combat is mostly quick and jarring - Reece doesn’t waste time as he bypasses minor obstacles to reach his objective and cut the head off the proverbial snake. This, too, is refreshing special ops realism, and there are countless examples of it. Compare to Jack Reacher (another popular Amazon show), who is happy to mill about as a magnet for low-level goons, instilling dramatic terror in the boss villains which, while esthetically satisfying, is hardly the approach a SEAL would take.

Lee Child is the more accomplished writer and may have some lessons for Jack Carr because The Terminal List seems strangely confined, perhaps by its very adherence to realism. Reese can’t mill about like Reacher, which would violate the whole tactical playbook. He has to cut the head off the snake, we can’t fill the middle acts with the battle being taken to him by various goons. Carr’s solution is to 24ize or Punisherize the plot by making each supposedly top villain reveal new information about who the real villain is. By the end we have trouble determining what exactly this one did to earn brutal justice at Reece’s hands. Our sympathy for Reece deteriorates.

This is more than a minor issue (SPOILER ALERT FOR REALZ):

Reece enlists another former SEAL, Ben Edwards (Taylor Kitsch, made for this role), to help him on his revenge quest. And so Ben does, saving Reece’s life countless times, going along with a plan that appears to be spiraling into the murder of the entire planet, putting his life on the line, even when unsure of Reece’s sanity. Then we learn he is just another traitor who set up an entire SEAL team to be murdered, apparently because someone told him “they’re going to die ignominiously from brain tumors, might as well put em out of their misery”.

What SEAL would be so stupid and evil to accept this justification for murder? Have the SEALs fallen so low? Carr must be aware of this hole as he gives Edwards further motivation in the form of 20 million dollars, but would even that be worth it when your whole identity is based on a vaunted military brotherhood? I guess we are supposed to believe that Edwards helped Reece out of guilt, grimly accepting that he might eventually find himself on the list. But we can’t even process this except in retrospect - we’ve seen Edwards heroism time and again and now we are expected to turn on him based on a bit of jarring exposition?

By the end James Reece has effectively become a villain as he robotically dispatches his heroic best friend. The idea that taking revenge can destroy oneself as well as one’s target is a common (cliched by now) plot-theme of revenge fiction ever since Count of Monte Cristo. But even if he took vengeance too far, the Count remained sympathetic. Dumas was a Romantic. Is Carr? Or is The Terminal List another nasty bit of modernist anti-heroism? The ending leaves a void with nothing to fill. Everyone in the world is apparently evil, other than Reece’s dead family. The final murder of Ben Edwards is a seemingly deliberate insult to an audience dishonestly conned into sympathy for Reece.

Maybe it’s not Carr’s fault - I haven’t read the book so I can’t say for sure. Director Antoine Fuqua is well-versed in palatizing nihilist messaging via compelling entertainment like Training Day. Maybe he, or anti-military producers at Amazon, needed to Hollywood things down a bit. My suspicion, though, is that Carr made a questionable creative decision in order to better sell Hollywood and placate the left.

The bitter irony is that the left / critics hate The Terminal List - likely they can’t stomach SEAL heroics long enough to enjoy the artistic temper tantrum of the final two episodes. Others (like me) will get sucked in by these same heroics and thus be confused and befuddled by the finale. So we deplorables rate Terminal List high on the Tomatometer despite the finale, because for 5-6 episodes it made Netflix’ Punisher revenge fantasy look childish, and in comparison to the rest of the junk out there it looks pretty good, flaws and all.

I hope any crimes I’ve committed here against the estimable Jack Carr aren’t so severe as to warrant torture before death - a quick shot through the back of my unsuspecting skull, please! Best way to go.