The Terminal List: TV Review

Buoyed by the success of Reacher and John Krasinski's Jack Ryan, Prime Video will be hoping the combination of Chris Pratt's star power and a military conspiracy story will be streaming gold.

But unfortunately, The Terminal List, which is based on a five book series by Jack Carr, is unlikely to thrill as much as you'd remotely hope it to.

Pratt stars as Navy SEAL James Reece who heads home after his entire platoon is ambushed during a high-stakes mission. But surrounded by coffins, and only one other survivor, Reece finds he comes under suspicion when being debriefed by his superiors.

Casting doubt on his recollections of the event (repeatedly shown through flashback and feeling like a 13 Hours companion piece), Reece can't believe what's going on. It's a feeling further compounded when his other SEAL colleague is found dead a day after returning, seemingly suicidal at having survived when his other unit members didn't.

As Reece begins to dig deeper, he feels there's a conspiracy at work, which places him under suspicion and his family in danger...

While the first episode of The Terminal List is a relatively tautly helmed piece of the usual military fare, it can't save the show from feeling launched into tedium rather than edge-of-your-seat fare. 

Training Day's Antoine Fuqua helms the first episode but peppers the 65 minute outing with so many flashbacks and recreations of the failed mission, that it becomes tediously repeated and replayed throughout - and that comes mainly at the expense of building any character outside of the wiped-out platoon.

Things aren't helped by a charisma-free Pratt, whose soulless approach to a traumatised veteran feels more like a formulaic beat down than a fully fleshed out character. Scenes of Pratt's Reece shaking his head and looking confused to show puzzlement? Check. 

Riley Keough is woefully underused as well, and a final twist at the end of the first episode feels distinctly unearned in the emotional stakes, given how little any of the back home characters have been written. It's almost obligatory that because they're related to the Navy SEALs or on screen that we're expected to care - and not once does any of the writing convince us to invest in the rest of this 8 episode series.

While the ambush sequence is initially well choreographed and shot, and a burst of action at the end of episode one breathes some much-needed life into The Terminal List, all too often in this rote formulaic thriller are you left wanting.

There's an irony that this revenge thriller is called The Terminal List.

Because through much of the show's exposition and execution, it feels like the show is in danger of being on a terminal list itself - and in no danger of staging any kind of immediate recovery to become a vitally engaging show. Depressingly, it's a moribund show that's more interested in soulless execution and wasting its cast than delving deeply into its supposedly gripping conspiracy thriller trappings.

The Terminal List is streaming on Prime Video from Friday July 1.