Hewing to a tired Tom Clancy-ish formula, The Terminal List generally feels like numerous generic potboilers targeted at men who dream of taking up furious arms against a system that preys upon both the innocent and the servicemen and women who risk their lives to protect it. The sole conclusion one can draw from this is that someone is trying to eliminate Reece as a means of protecting a very important secret, and Reece consequently tries to clear his name in his family’s murders (since, as an unstable killing machine, he’s the obvious prime suspect) and searching for the perpetrators behind these attacks, leading to revelations concerning, among others, Navy bigwig Lorraine Hartley (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and corporate titan Steve Horn (Jai Courtney). He then goes home to find his wife Lauren (Riley Keough, in a painfully thankless role) and daughter Lucy (Arlo Mertz) assassinated in the kitchen. During a routine MRI scan to check out his brain, Reece is assailed by two masked gunmen. By the conclusion of its first installment, though, DiGilio’s series definitively reveals that Reece isn’t simply imagining things. The latter notion soon draws him to investigative reporter Katie Buranek ( Constance Wu), who wants him to speak on the record about his men’s tragic demises. The Terminal List’s early going concentrates on the question of whether Reece is losing his marbles or onto a covert scheme. Nonetheless, he decides that his recent undertaking was a trap orchestrated by nefarious forces who fed him bad intel and begins investigating what really happened with the aid of his close buddy, shaggy boozehound CIA spook Ben Edwards ( Taylor Kitsch). He becomes immediately convinced that someone is altering the record in order to cover up something, the problem being that his migraines and incessant conflation of various memories (seen in swirling flashbacks) are so rampant that he can’t trust his own thoughts. Reece returns stateside with a horrible concussion and an apparently faulty recollection of these catastrophic events and the subsequent suicide of a close platoonmate. 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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