The Contractor is a heartfelt action-thriller starring Chris Pine as Special Forces Sergeant James Harper. When Harper finds himself involuntarily discharged from the Army with no pension and in debt, he contracts with a private underground military force to provide for his family. His first assignment quickly takes a turn in the wrong direction. Harper is then forced to fight for his life while trying to make it home and uncover the motives of a dangerous conspiracy.
Pine is best known for playing Captain Kirk in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek and Star Trek and Beyond. He is also known for Outlaw King, Wonder Woman, and many more popular films. In The Contractor, Pine's character Harper suffers from a serious and traumatic past, interwoven in flashbacks throughout the film, yet is rounded with a magnetic vulnerability.
Ben Foster plays Harper’s brother-in-arms and former commanding officer Mike Denton. Foster is known for The Punisher, X-Men: The Last Stand, Alpha dog, and the list could go on. This isn’t the first time the two have shared the screen together. They both worked on the 2016 film Hell or High Water.
The Contractor stands strong on its own, but the strength of the actors’ rapport certainly speaks to their experiences together.
Chris Pine and Ben Foster on Working Together
“It’s always nice to get a call from a friend to say hello. And then it’s extra nice when they say, ‘Hello, would you like to join me in another round of questioning?’” Said Foster, then expanding on how he approaches his roles.
“I know a little bit about this, or maybe I have some kind of parallel emotional connection to the story. It’s never the same. The material speaks to things that, I know are a quiet engine from my own work — which is trauma. How do we negotiate that? How do we deal with it? How do we process it? How do we run from it? And this film felt like the potential to be a Trojan horse to ask those questions while maintaining an accelerated action. But it was grounded in the cost of violence rather than violence for violence’s sake. So long short of it, Chris and I, we have a friendship… real friends in our line of work.”
Pine’s character Harper equally asks these questions.
“You look at the truth of what’s happening and make sure that the truth plays. And there’s a scene that we shot that’s on the rooftop of a building toward the end… between Mike and James, which we had to reshoot to get it right… which seemed really right with these guys because they are brothers. And they’ve gone through some majorly emotionally trying circumstances. So, on the day, you try to give it as much as you can, and some people have different processes, but you’re going for the same thing, which is truth.” Said Pine.
Chris Pine on Authenticity in The Contractor
The Contractor does an excellent job of grounding itself in reality. Oftentimes, action movies are packed with unrealistic fight scenes and indestructible heroes. Harper, on the other hand, is human. We see him as an elite soldier in skill, but he does suffer from injuries as you would expect from a seasoned soldier. Bert Kuntz, a former US Army Special Forces Green Beret helped advise on the film and had a large part to do in maintaining this realism.
“Working with Bert was great… Bert was pivotal in looking through the script and making sure that certain things played right. For instance… [a] scene in the beginning of the film was originally written with a lot of pathos and emotion. And he called bull on that and said, ‘they’d probably be talking [expletive] about the guy, making fun of them.' And so we did that… He said it was, in fact, directly in line with how these guys would work... He worked with us physically to make sure that when we were working together as a team, out in the field, it looked like we knew what we were doing and moving right.” Said Pine.
In the official production notes, producer Basil Iwanyk also commented on Kuntz’s impact on the film.
“For me, it was sponging up stories, information, little things here and there, about how they speak to one another, how they relate to one another, what does the gear look like, how do you set up your rig. All these things were very, very particular… Bert was invaluable in that regard.”
The Contractor is directed by Tarik Saleh. It's a convincing film with justified characters, including supporting roles from Gillian Jacobs as Harper’s wife Brianne and Kiefer Sutherland as Rusty Jennings.
The Contractor is rated R for violence and language and will be released on April 1, 2022, in Theaters, On Digital, and On Demand.