DIVINE JUSTICE

MAGA Actor’s Comeback Is a Wild Right-Wing Action Fantasy

Jim Caviezel is a gung-ho commando protecting the heartland in “Ghost Soldier.”

The Passion of the Christ’s Jesus saves by killing mercilessly in Ghost Soldier, a contemporary pseudo-Western in which Jim Caviezel’s special-ops veteran doles out biblical-grade justice to protect a clan from predatory evildoers.

A red-meat-and-potatoes kill-‘em-all fantasy about a gung-ho commando with a license to annihilate, Land of Bad director William Eubank’s film (Nov. 11, in theaters) doesn’t have an imaginative bone in its body or thought in its head, delivering standard-issue action embellished with high-tech weaponry.

Saying his prayers to Saint Michael (the patron saint of soldiers) before taking out a gaggle of domestic and foreign enemies, the MAGA actor’s title character is a military badass fit for the Yellowstone crowd, and if his saga is woefully hackneyed, it at least boasts a jingoistic B-movie spirit that would have made it right at home in the 1980s.

Racing through its plot setup lest anyone stop to ask questions, Ghost Soldier follows Henry “Fitz” Fitzgerald (Caviezel), an ex-Green Beret in Valentine, Wyoming, where he designs revolutionary armaments for Virginia’s DARPA think tank, spearheaded by a friendly government agent (Shea Whigham). Fitz resides in a house located on top of an abandoned mine that’s been converted into an artillery laboratory, making him an armed-forces Batman. That said, after one nasty skirmish, he washes off the blood and reveals a giant tattoo (of a snake and skulls) on his back, casting him as a John Wick knock-off.

Fitz’s lack of originality extends to his fondness for spouting tough-guy quips before murdering his adversaries—a habit that aligns him with his genre ancestors Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone. The difference is, Fitz has clearly been fashioned as a politically and culturally conservative hero. This is evidenced not only by multiple scenes of him praying, but also by his staunch dedication to keeping the American prairie unspoiled and his intense distaste for the Brownstone corporation that’s trying to take it over by buying up every available parcel of land—and violently forcing those uninterested in selling to sign on the dotted line.

Brownstone is interested in Wyoming property because it believes the future’s most precious commodity will be water—for example, for data centers—and it operates at the behest of Bahrain’s powers that be. The two holdouts in the conglomerate’s sights are Fitz’s estate and the Hernandez farmstead, and Caviezel’s protagonist immediately establishes himself as a noble protector by rescuing the family’s youngest member, Jack, from a pair of menacing hunters.

He’s even less thrilled by the Brownstone emissaries he meets at the Hernandez home, and he earns their enmity when he explains to Jack’s mom and grandfather (Carlos Gómez) that they’re being duped by the interlopers, thereby initiating the conflict that’ll take up the remainder of the lean 90-minute film.

“Corporate tyranny is still tyranny,” states Fitz, and after visiting gun store owner and surrogate father figure Henry (Michael Ironside) and going on a hunting outing with Jack, he has a not-so-friendly run-in with Brownstone’s hired goons (led by Garret Dillahunt’s henchman). This confrontation ends with Fitz being stabbed and dumped in a raging river.

Nonetheless, Ghost Soldier’s warrior rises from the figurative dead—he is played by Mel Gibson’s Christ, after all—and begins taking out these cretins with a night vision helmet (which makes him appear to have four glowing eyes) and machine guns and rifles whose shells navigate obstacles, splinter apart, and, in one impressive instance, transform into an explosive drone.

Chris Papasadero’s script depicts big business as a rapacious monster that doesn’t just take what it wants but, in doing so, violates the “oath” that every man and woman inherently makes to Mother Earth. These are run-of-the-mill rural-urban, rich-poor, modern-old-school dynamics, and Ghost Soldier milks them for formulaic thrills, with Eubank presenting multiple slow-motion vistas of Fitz’s bullets exploding from his gun’s barrel and hurtling toward their targets. When not orchestrating shootouts, the director stages familiar, if bruising hand-to-hand fights. Yet for all their technical competence, none of the film’s set pieces are particularly remarkable.

Brownstone’s American thugs are no match for Fitz, so the corporation—on the orders of their Persian overlords—contracts foreign terrorists to finish the job. These mercenaries are Serbian psychopaths who relish the opportunity to hunt the “ghost” defending Valentine, and their participation furthers the material’s portrait of the heartland under siege from homegrown and alien forces.

Ghost Soldier’s us-vs-them undercurrents are right on the surface, and though it isn’t egregiously heavy on overt political statements, it does eventually have Fitz justify his virtuous rampage by proclaiming, “My blood runs red. I’m a patriot.”

Ghost Soldier is a narrow narrative affair, and its only other noteworthy character is Sheriff Parker (Olivia Thirlby), who’s so superfluous she could have been easily excised. Thirlby is unconvincing as this law enforcement do-gooder, but it’s hardly as if the film cares about believability or coherence. Rather, its only directive is having Fitz ply his lethal trade in various ways. Thus, he pops out of the water to snipe an unsuspecting executive, mows down a collection of faceless antagonists, and—during the final showdown against Beau Knapp’s Serbian fiend—employs a nifty magnetic device to gruesome ends.

For Caviezel, Ghost Soldier is both the most mainstream project he’s starred in years and an actioner colored in Republican-friendly hues, and it shows he still has a reasonably commanding screen presence. Shooting steely looks at his trespasser foes and grimly grinning as he dispatches them with extreme prejudice, the actor embodies Fitz as a traditional militaristic champion decked out in bleeding-edge gear, and his performance is elevated by the screenplay’s amusingly cheesy trailer-ready one-liners, be it him promising, “I’m not a threat—I’m a guarantee” or announcing, “God will judge our enemies. I’ll just arrange the meeting.”

Ghost Soldier is too unsubtly MAGA-friendly to get the headliner back into Hollywood’s good graces. Nonetheless, the film’s no-frills mayhem, laced with just the right amount of right-wing flavor, may do something just as important for the star: earn him an action franchise of his own.

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Nick SchagerEntertainment Critic

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