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

Detailed summary

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…

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.

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…

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