In the same vein, you can also hear a baby crying off-screen when Jack and Patrick first enter the DA’s home, which means when Patrick later tells Ethan (Jon Bernthal) he won’t kill him or his wife Allison (Medina Senghore) because she’s pregnant, he’s lying through his teeth. In fact, Jack picks going against the shooter at the end over Angelina Jolie’s Hannah because he’s furious about getting the whole Two-Face treatment with the fire to the face earlier in the movie, and he hopes Allison is holding the deer rifle in the woods.
Conveying motivation through implication applies to most of the characters in Those Who Wish Me Dead, and what they’re dying over. When Connor’s father Owen (Jake Weber) sees on the morning news in Jacksonville, Florida that the DA he worked for died “in a gas leak,” he immediately goes on the run with his son, getting farther than the men who wish him dead could have anticipated. And he gives us just enough to know why he is so scared with his confession to his son.
“I’m a forensic accountant,” Owen tells the boy, “which means I look for things that don’t add up. And I found some. The man I worked for, he was killed today because of what I found. But I still know it, which means they’re gonna come after me too.” When his son protests they should go to the police, Owen insists that the police protection didn’t save the DA. “The case implicates a lot of people, son, people with a lot to lose. Governors, congressmen. We can only trust people that we know.”
It’s a wise choice, although trusting the family that he knows is exactly how Jack and Patrick find the father and son so easily. After breaking into the accountant’s home, Patrick coolly spies a family photo of the pair in Montana with Uncle Ethan and Aunt Allison, thereby knowing they’re going to Soda Butte Survival School in Montana. The killers get there by plane long before Owen drives to his doom on the Lewis and Clark Trail.
Still, from what little Owen tells us, we can ascertain that he is an accountant who specialized in tracing money laundering, embezzlement, fraud, and the type of racketeering where organized crime and politics intersect. While we’re never told which politicians are implicated, it’s a fair bet that there are many in the Florida area caught with their hands in a violent, possibly treasonous cookiejar. One is even tempted to speculate it could involve a former president with a Floridian residence (notably Those Who Wish Me Dead was originally due out in 2020), but that is perhaps just imaginative thinking.
The full weight of the menace, however, is exemplified by Tyler Perry who has a tantalizing cameo as “Arthur,” the laconic heavy who makes an unexpected appearance in Montana to apply pressure on Jack and Patrick for failing to kill Connor in the car wreck. We don’t know a lot about Arthur, but the way he says “we promise absolutes, and unlikely is not an absolute” seems to suggest he’s a crime boss of the highest order.
