The Terminal List

While primarily made for the couch-surfing dad, if you accept this TV series for what it is, The Terminal List is an entertaining, adrenalin-fueled adventure.

It keeps the tempo up enough to stay entertaining from the first shot to the last. It feels more like a traditional episodic TV show than movie star-led shows usually do (and Jack Carr has plenty of other James Reece books if Amazon wants to keep the show going). It's popcorn entertainment with a sheen of seriousness.

The Terminal List is not some disaster, nor is it unwatchable. In fact, it'll likely garner a huge following and become a hit for the streamer, but a film might have been the more beneficial route to take, especially for Pratt's performance and the overall story. ... But at the end of the day, a story this simple shouldn't be this damn long.

Though the complicated particulars of the conspiracy are fairly clever and original, if also improbable, the basic mechanics of the plot remain simple and straightforward and easy to follow: Set ‘em up and knock ‘em down. Not a show for everyone, and not what one would ever call “fun,” but it may just be your cup of tea, with a dash of strychnine.

The Terminal List aspires to be a thinking person’s thriller, but it’s neither too thinky nor too thrilling. But damn if it doesn’t feel a bit invigorating at times to go down the dark hallways of this world of people of action, and think, yeah, this motherfucker is ours.

Ambiguity dwindles immediately, as the show overextends a solid revenge plot through eight episodes of okay-at-best action and endless shadowy meetings between shady military-industrial types.

There are far too many moments during “The Terminal List” when you feel like you’re watching boys playing soldier, or violence inspired by videogames. At the same time, the story—based on the book by Jack Carr and adapted by David DiGilio—has adequate forward momentum, despite its very obvious effort to march a viewer through a gantlet of 21st-century villainy.

[Chris Pratt is] miscast in this occasionally thrilling and well-paced but ultimately predictable, formulaic and cliché-riddled series. In a role that calls for an actor to demonstrate a wide range of the deepest possible human emotions, Pratt comes across as slightly stiff and not fully immersed in the character.

This eight-part Amazon Prime Video miniseries blasts its way through drab and ridiculous conventions with humorless, extreme prejudice. It somehow manages to generate bingeable suspense, though, and even a hint that its well-worn twists have something to say about how power is abused these days.

Those with an appetite for the Jacks (Reacher and Ryan) will find something to enjoy in the violent infallibility of Reece. There is plenty of skull cracking and head shots. But the plot, in so much as there is one, will make about as much sense to viewers as it does to the heavily concussed Reece.

Chris Pratt tamps down his natural humor to play a Navy SEAL trapped in a deadly government conspiracy. Not bad as flag-waving Dad TV, this slick, souped-up military revenge thriller comes off as a suspenseful two-hour movie trapped in eight hours of streaming series bloa

As for the plot, there’s no “sizzle until it fizzles” because the story never really gets off the ground, never gets up and running.

A lot of “The Terminal List” is pretty standard-issue, macho-man military conspiracy theory fare, just darker, bleaker, duller and more humorless than usual.

Amazon has flexed its muscles with military-style action series (see "Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan" and "Reacher"), but The Terminal List adds a numbingly simple-minded revenge saga to that subgenre. Despite the promotional benefits of featuring star-producer Chris Pratt as a grittier kind of avenger, this brutal eight-episode slog squanders its talent in front of and behind the camera.

Wooden self-serious streaming content at its most mediocre.

It sounds like a fun, brutal read, but it’s stretched into a monotonous slog in TV form.

The personality of The Terminal List can best be described as “grim,” as are the performances of Pratt and the rest of the cast. Life right now is pretty grim as it is; we don’t need this much monotonous darkness in our entertainment, too.

This is a dour, miserable sit, one that would be tough to take as a two-hour film, and has been inexplicably ‘roided up to eight hours.

The scripts are a compendium of clichés, all military jargon and rah-rah platitudes. The cloak-and-dagger aspects of this adventure are pedestrian by any standard. ... The Terminal List wildly overstays its welcome and provides few moments of memorable excitement.

The Terminal List‘s plot defies logic, if you stop to think about it for even a minute, but it confidently shoves its way past any such concerns. It’s utterly humorless, too, punctuated by crude bursts of graphic violence. ... The cast is talented, to be sure, but they’re just going through the motions here.

[Pratt's] laziest performance to date, lethargically shuffling through scenes like he’s just here for the cash, unable to bring any real shades of humanity to an admittedly half-a-note character.

A miscast Pratt isn’t the only problem with this eight-part pudding of a production. The script and story are even worse. It’s that hoary old thriller trope: a conspiracy that goes right to the top.

Pratt’s serious acting still does not have much depth to it, and he does no service to that with his performance in this openly deranged show. ... “The Terminal List” is gratuitous with a dead-serious face, one that is introduced as being unstable before its accompanying body is then treated like our instrument of truth. Released just in time for the Fourth of July, “The Terminal List” is jingoism at its finest, and absolute worst.