Starting with his big-screen Hollywood breakthrough in the early 2010s, Taylor Kitsch‘s career has been rather famously overshadowed by commercial flops. Notably launching to international recognition via the back-to-back box-office failures of John Carter and Battleship in 2012 (not to mention X-Men Origins: Wolverine or the disappointing second season of True Detective), Kitsch has never really headlined an enterprise that was a slam dunk. He’s often garnered critical praise for his work in projects as diverse as Lone Survivor, The Normal Heart, and Netflix’s recent Western hit American Primeval, but there’s also been a sense that Kitsch has more star power than the surrounding material has allowed him to demonstrate. It’s a pleasure to announce that the star who’s always been captivating and reliable, even as his filmography has seen undeniable ups and downs, is front and center in a big-budget, highly entertaining action series.

The Terminal List: Dark Wolf is a prequel to Prime Video’s 2022 streaming smash The Terminal List, which starred Chris Pratt and was based on the novel of the same name by Jack Carr. If anything, Dark Wolf is even better than the original series, compulsively bingeable and striking a balance between grittiness and escapism. It’s likely to please fans of the flagship series and fuel interest in further Terminal List installments.

What Is ‘The Terminal List: Dark Wolf’ About?

The Terminal List: Dark Wolf fleshes out the original series’ supporting character, Kitsch’s Ben Edwards, a Navy SEAL-turned Chief Special Warfare Operator who’s a longstanding colleague and classmate of Pratt’s Lieutenant Commander James Reece. The action kicks off in 2015, during the team’s deployment in Mosul. The crew is tracking an ISIS leader, and things go south in a major way when a hot-headed Edwards kills a CIA asset in cold blood (though not without reason that hooks a viewer’s sympathy). Edwards and Lieutenant Raife Hastings (Tom Hopper) are stripped of their standing, and both are thrust into a more shadowy level of warfare as the show moves further into the spy genre.

Dark Wolf opens as a war series. It’s often solemn, and always respectful of those who serve. It ultimately dips a toe into other genres over its seven-episode run, including the second episode’s extended spy set piece that our protagonist aptly dubs “straight-up James Bond sh*t.” Yet the symmetry of the serious elements and what borders on action fantasy at times is commendable, and actually works.

‘The Terminal List: Dark Wolf’ Has Better Action Than Most Action Movies

The Terminal List: Dark Wolf is well-acted across the board, with performers who appear to be truly in their wheelhouse and filmmakers who recognize their strengths. The original Terminal List represented Pratt’s finest dramatic performance ever, and he’s a welcome presence in the Dark Wolf‘s bookends, but at the center of it all, Kitsch is terrific. As has always been the case, even in movies that didn’t deserve him, he’s an uncommonly interesting action presence with many contrasting qualities. He’s a nimble physical presence, but he speaks in a growl that will fill any sound system. He looks like a movie star, but he’s chameleonic. It’s easy to sympathize with Edwards, but that doesn’t make him less intimidating, and Kitsch is a great fit for this kind of antihero. Hopper is also impressive, a truly imposing, towering physical presence in contrast. The relationships between Edwards, Reece, and Hastings are also unpredictable, but never lose their authenticity.

As was the case with the original series, the most underrated aspect of Dark Wolf is the female characters, who are well-defined, tough, and believable. Rona-Lee Shimon and Shiraz Tzarfati often upstage all the other characters as Mossad operatives Eliza Perash and Tal Varon, respectively, and Tzarfati’s close-quarters fight to the death against a would-be assailant is the series’ most memorable and smallest-scale action sequence.

‘The Terminal List: Dark Wolf’ Sets Up a Larger Universe for Prime Video

When assessing Dark Wolf purely as an entertainment piece, as it’s intended to be, there’s very little to gripe about. It feels a little unclear how much we’re meant to sympathize with Edwards, especially in the context of the first season and its ending in particular, though perhaps this ambiguity is by design. The final stretch of Dark Wolf perhaps strains a bit in setting up the larger Terminal List universe, but it’s also easy to be excited about future installments in light of how fun this enterprise has been.

It’s perfectly possible, perhaps even likely, that The Terminal List: Dark Wolf won’t be universally hailed. The original series was one of the most divisive in memory, with a 40% approval rating from critics on the Tomatometer at odds with a 94% audience score, and viewership that broke several streaming records for the service. The truth is that this is big-budget Dad TV done about as well as humanly possible—nothing more or less. The Terminal List: Dark Wolf has no interest in reinventing the wheel or really being particularly innovative beyond its exemplary craftsmanship—and it’s easy to get caught up in admiration for a show that takes this much pride in presenting the kind of old-school action entertainment that feels increasingly rare these days.

The Terminal List: Dark Wolf is now streaming on Prime Video.

Here you can find the original article; the photos and images used in our article also come from this source. We are not their authors; they have been used solely for informational purposes with proper attribution to their original source.[/nospin]

Share on Facebook

Post on X

Follow us

Save