The Terminal List

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.