Set primarily in Coronado, California, but pandering to male red-state viewers with routine references to beer, guns, country music, and hunting, The Terminal List stars Pratt as James Reece, a decorated Navy SEAL who embarks on a mission in Syria to capture a chemical-weapons baddie that culminates with an ambush, resulting in the death of his entire squad. There’s none of that here, and yet the single-mindedness of his character, and the material, is so fanatical that it often tips over, sporadically warping an otherwise straightforward payback narrative into something dark and disturbing. As recently confirmed by Jurassic World Dominion, Pratt’s stolid leading-man routine is usually his least interesting mode of operation the actor’s best work ( Parks and Rec, Guardians of the Galaxy) undercuts any pretenses of He-Man ruggedness with goofy, self-effacing humor. There’s some serious danger to The Terminal List, courtesy of its excessive take on the military-conspiracy genre and its headliner’s turn as an impaired war hero running amok as a shoot-first, ask-questions-never vigilante. Given its suggestion that slaughtering your powers-that-be enemies for a righteous revenge cause is totally OK and very cool, the morality of showrunner David DiGilio and executive producer/director Antoine Fuqua’s eight-part series (July 1) is, let’s say, lacking. Still, if this adaptation of Jack Carr’s novel mostly fits itself into a particular dad-entertainment streaming niche, it also, to a large extent, comes off as a wet dream for militia-minded anti-establishment kooks, replete with a Pratt performance as a Navy SEAL who responds to injustice by murdering the guilty with extreme prejudice. The Terminal List features Chris Pratt going vengefully homicidal due, in part, to a serious mental condition in Amazon’s latest, which follows in the tradition of Jack Ryan and Jack Reacher by delivering gung-ho macho action-drama tailor-made for fortysomething Call of Duty players.
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