had been helping Saudi Arabia for a while, despite a pattern of war crimes!), he agrees to assist Reece in hunting down the first person on his kill list, who is played by Warren Kole, the same actor who portrays hapless husband Jeff on Yellowjackets. After the funerals, even though Ben is “on Yemen time” ( where the U.S. Ben’s one story about how much he liked Lauren involves a time he slept over and urinated on her couch, and I am beginning to understand why this man has had a string of divorces. Reece, Reece’s uncle figure Marco (Marco Rodríguez), and Ben and Reece’s pilot friend and fellow service member Liz Riley (Tyner Rushing) give Ben crap for his series of failed marriages while also sharing memories of Lauren and Lucy. Reece’s wife Lauren (Riley Keough) and daughter Lucy (Arlo Mertz) have been assassinated, and Kitsch’s Ben helps carry one of their coffins at the joint funeral. Anyway!) We also learn in this episode that Ben is heavily inked, with a bunch of Navy- and military-themed artwork, including a gigantic ship on his back, a wolf on his chest, and, interestingly, a line from a Walt Whitman poem: “I am the man, I suffered, I was there.” Unexpected! (“Persia House” is a unit of the CIA devoted to gathering intelligence in and about Iran it’s cute that The Terminal List mentions this effort but not the 1953 coup of the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh that the CIA helped engineer. His shirt shows off his forearm tattoos, which helps distract me from the fact that Ben mentions connecting with “Persia House” for information on the Iranian chemical-weapons-maker Reece is convinced murdered his men. Ben, who works for the CIA now but previously served with Reece, is wearing what will end up being his series uniform: slim-fit jeans, a knit top, mirrored sunglasses, very Bodhi– Point Break energy. In the premiere, which starts with Pratt’s James Reece quoting the Bible, Kitsch’s Ben Edwards picks up Reece after he returns home from the disastrous Odin’s Sword mission in Syria. And yet! I watched all eight episodes of this thing because this is how Taylor Kitsch looks in it: Carr has sneered at critics who disliked the show by calling them “triggered,” but mostly, I was just bored.Īnd yet. military, and everyone else - government officials, defense contractors, journalists, civilians, and of course those Iranians living both abroad and inside the U.S. After he assumes that Iranian military forces are somehow operating out of San Francisco and targeting him, he immediately becomes a domestic terrorist who assassinates and bombs his way through eight episodes in which he’s never positioned as anything less than a morally right hero. (Example: The first interior-design suggestion made by Chris Pratt’s character as he’s walking through the new home he’s bought with his wife is about where his guns will go.) The gist: Pratt plays a Navy SEAL whose platoon is mysteriously killed in Syria and who is then framed back home for the murders of his wife and daughter. Like Prime Video’s 2021 film Tom Clancy’s Without Remorse, it is a chest-thumping miasma of patriotic aggression and xenophobic paranoia, and wholly predictable in its presentation of both. The Terminal List is, to put it plainly, one of the worst things I’ve watched in a long time. For the most part, though, Kitsch is on a certain path, and that path led him to The Terminal List, Prime Video’s adaptation of Jack Carr’s best-selling novel and its current No. There are the outliers in content ( Waco, The Normal Heart, Only the Brave) and the roles that fall within these limitations but in which Kitsch’s work is quite good (the second season of True Detective). Post– Friday Night Lights and the underperforming triple whammy of John Carter (underappreciated!), Battleship, and Savages, Kitsch has settled into a career nearly universally populated by law-enforcement guys. There once was a time when Taylor Kitsch did not exclusively play military-adjacent characters, but that time has passed. Spoilers follow for Prime Video series The Terminal List.
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