Chris Pratt in Amazon’s ‘The Terminal List’: TV Review

Daniel Fienberg
·7 min read
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Your basic weekend BBQ griller might just grab the nearest package of ground beef at the grocery store, but somebody with high culinary aspirations obsesses over proportions. Though the true experts might tinker with cuts of meat in different combinations, a good starting position is with fat percentages. An amateur thinks, “Less fat is more meat and therefore must be better,” while the expert knows that fat equals juiciness and unless you enjoy a dry, beefy burger — and some do — the key is finding the right ratio.

Chris Pratt has been figuratively (and literally) fiddling with his professional fat percentages for over a decade as he’s been making the career transition from likable TV comic foil with unexpectedly strong bone structure to increasingly generic leading man. Whatever the right fat-to-beef ratio was, Pratt found it in the Guardians of the Galaxy movies, blending convincing action chops and enough jocular charm to carry a loopy premise in a way that few other actors could have. Pratt’s Jurassic Park movies aren’t completely without mirth, but his aura has been so drained of those distinctive elements that almost anybody could have played whatever his character’s name is.

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On the bright side, there’s nowhere Pratt’s career can go after Amazon’s new drama The Terminal List. There’s no more draining or siphoning of personality trains and levity that could possibly occur going forward. The Terminal List is all beef, all muscular stringy beef — and, at eight hours for a book that easily could have been adapted in two hours, it’s been left on the grill for so long that the result is dry and tasteless. It’s the entertainment equivalent of a charred hockey puck, with the same limited range of flavor and aesthetics. It should then go without saying that of course there will be an audience for The Terminal List.

The Terminal List was adapted from the first of five Jack Carr novels built around the character of James Reece (Pratt). Reece is a Navy SEAL commander, and in the series’ opening scene, his platoon is sent on a mission that goes very, very wrong. Reece returns to San Diego grieving for his men and anxious to get answers, but the more leads he follows, the more danger he’s about to put his wife (Riley Keough) and other loved ones in. Soon, Reece is on the run helped by his SEAL-turned-CIA buddy Ben (Taylor Kitsch) and pursued by an online journalist (Constance Wu’s Katie), who could be an adversary or an ally.

At various points, Reece’s other potential adversaries might or might not include a dogged NCIS officer (Warren Kole’s Holder), a dogged FBI agent (JD Pardo’s Tony), a dogged venture capitalist (Jai Courtney’s Steven), the dogged Secretary of Defense (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and more. Or perhaps his greatest adversary is his own brain, because Reece is experiencing hallucinations and dissociative episodes that could make him a danger to himself and others.

A thing written in my Terminal List notes that has rarely been uttered by any critic of any media: “This is a real waste of Jai Courtney.”

Courtney is playing a tech mogul with a strange military fetish that isn’t explained, because despite the layers of episodic blubber to which Amazon demanded zero apparent flensing — not only is The Terminal List eight episodes, but those episodes are all 50+ minutes — rather than using the time to bring any characters to life, creator David DiGilio has structured the show as almost a video game of level bosses. So Courtney is wasted and Kole is wasted and Pardo is wasted and Sean Gunn is wasted. And a premise that could have had some ripped-from-the-headlines resonance related to military PTSD and the administrative systems failing our men and women — but mostly men here — in uniform is wasted.

Reece has a list — a terminal list, if you will — of people he wants to target for revenge and, like a ripped Arya Stark without an iota of personality or likability, he works his way down his revenge list in a way that more than a few viewers are going to find makes him bizarrely unsympathetic. Not a single person he’s attempting to avenge received enough screen time to justify behavior that even Fox News — the near-exclusive news outlet of anybody watching TV in The Terminal List — figures makes Reece a domestic terrorist.

Because Reece has been written without a shred of an individual voice, making use of none of Pratt’s established appealing traits, you’ll be rooting for him for one of two reasons: First, he’s a SEAL and therefore invariably heroic; or second, because the pilot ends with a manipulative event that turns tragedy into cheap narrative shorthand. Opportunities to use Reece’s impairments to deliver different sides and contexts to the character fall flat. Reece is monomaniacal and monotonously somber and Pratt embraces that.

In a show that generally suffers from an Ozark level of reduced lighting — Ozark and The Terminal List are produced by THR‘s corporate siblings at MRC Television — Pratt gives a matching performance. He’s consistently and unrelentingly glum in a way that a 100-minute movie could have covered up with a few snazzy action set pieces and a climactic showdown shamelessly ripped off from A Few Good Men. Each episode could have been trimmed to 15 minutes with no loss of nuance or characterization, and I suspect it would have made the series’ target demo — tuning in for patriotically waving flags, substance-free military jargon and the very rare tautly edited suspense set-piece — just as happy.

There are at least a half-dozen genuinely bad performances that I don’t blame at all on the actors. Wu is ridiculously bland in a character drafted with no interest in either basic journalism or what has made Wu such a strong screen presence in Fresh Off the Boat and Crazy Rich Asians. As with Pratt in his more stolid blockbuster roles, Wu’s primary motivation may be proving that she can play dull. Ditto with Keough, who I hope was well compensated for a presence in the opening credits that represents either contractual maneuvering or guild-endorsed trickery.

The pilot for The Terminal List was directed by Antoine Fuqua, who knows how to make claustrophobic action professional-looking if nothing else. Most of the rest of the series is people driving around in the dark, skulking in the dark, experiencing headaches in the dark and engaging in pew-pew-pew-level gunplay. The violence is pervasive yet abrupt, and with none of the bad guys getting the chance to develop as particularly villainous figures, there’s little cathartic pleasure to be taken here, even in the moments Reece is actually in the moral or ethical right. This was a chance to take a thriller framework and include meaningful exploration of trauma and other veteran-related struggles, accentuating bravery and heroism. Instead, it’s leaden, mostly emotionless and if its pace is fast, that’s because anything important was removed.

On Parks and Recreation, Pratt’s Andy Dwyer developed a stern law enforcement alter ego, Special Agent Burt Tyrannosaurus Macklin. Andy’s commitment to Burt Macklin makes Burt Macklin hilarious, intentionally. I’m not sure if James Reece is basically Burt Macklin without the self-aware winking or if he’s just a character Andy Dwyer would take very seriously, right down to his wrap-around sunglasses and continuity-challenged facial hair. Pratt has finally found the perfect zero-fat, zero-humor vehicle. It will be up to viewers to decide if their July 4 cookout weekend deserves better than this burnt offering to red-meat America.

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