Ghost Soldier is more incoherent than conservative, and it's plenty conservative

Sound Of Freedom's Jim Caveizel returns for a haphazard military drama that makes promises it can't keep.

By Siddhant Adlakha | November 12, 2026 | 9:00am

Photo: Sony

Film Reviews Jim Caviezel

Ghost Soldier is more incoherent than conservative, and it's plenty conservative

You can tell what you’re in for with Ghost Soldier within its opening seconds, when lower-third text establishing the location is obscured by a pillar before you can read it, and a military staffer hands a file to Shea Whigham at his Pete Hegsethiest. Yet, the chaotic, conservative action drama has a few surprises up its sleeve in terms of subject matter, if not necessarily when it comes to execution. While it may not be hard to read the noxious political tea leaves Ghost Soldier splashes in your face, it’s also just not enough of an actual movie to be bothered by.

As directed by William Eubank, Ghost Soldier is barely coherent, and it makes some audacious promises it doesn’t even try to keep, starting with its ex-Green-Beret-in-hiding, Fitz (Jim Caveizel; yes, it’s one of those) testing out the curving bullets that he helped develop for a secret military outfit run by Whigham’s shadowy leader. These little gizmos are awesome and imaginative, and they never come up again. What gives? Well, for one thing, Ghost Soldier has been edited to within an inch of its life, with its tale of corporate goons forcing people off their land presented so choppily that some shots barely last, and when others do, you’re never quite sure where you’re meant to be looking.

An early montage of Fitz fishing and wrangling horses in the great outdoors at sunset—the first of dozens of swooping, indiscriminate landscape shots tracking laterally with a crane or, more likely, drone—gestures at a wistfulness Ghost Soldier takes as a given. It conjures cheap and maudlin sentiments surrounding an Americana under threat, with melodrama that depends on every supporting character being a military veteran of some sort. However, in a turn aptly representing the times, the movie’s major enemy is one you’re likely to find in even the most left-leaning modern productions: In the cushy boardroom of Brownstone Industries, apathetic executives discuss building new AI data centers and siphoning off a river in Wyoming by forcibly buying up the surrounding land. They’ve displaced all but three homes, one occupied by an elderly couple (who they force out at gunpoint), another by a Hispanic family, the Hernandezes (who stand their ground), and the third by Fitz himself, who takes that family’s 10-year-old son Jack Hernandez (Cameron Gayden) under his wing by teaching him how to hunt.

It’s good to know that no matter your political persuasion, we can all agree that the corporate push for environmentally destructive data centers and the displacement of people from their homes are Bad with a capital “B.” However, that’s about as agreeable as Ghost Soldier ever gets from pretty much any standpoint. No matter how stoically he grunts, Caviezel is no Clint Eastwood (perhaps the last bastion of conservative Hollywood cinema), so the film’s ultra-capable protagonist is rendered little more than a vengeful plot device. The masked hoodlums tasked with forcing people from their homes—led by Garret Dillahunt—are anonymous and dispensable when they pop up in a skirmish that starts with a truly bewildering bit of skewed geography: Fitz floats down a river only to end up in what seems to be the exact same spot.

It’s the kind of lapse in logic you might forgive, but here it speaks to a particularly haphazard edit, the kind that doesn’t let up until the end credits mercifully roll. No good film is too long, but conversely, the 90-minute runtime of Ghost Soldier is endless and exhausting. Scenes are strung together through slow-motion transition shots, as action beats land with little impact or clarity (the film seems to cut around all the most exciting action) while Caviezel’s quips, taken from better movies like Man On Fire, are often too gurgly to be understood.

A more paranoid plot does eventually emerge, in the form of Russian mercenaries, Arab billionaires, and a strangely off-handed mention of North Korea having launched an attack on the United States—one we never see, nor one that has any bearing on the plot. All of this adds to the sense that Ghost Soldier is some kind of political fever dream meant to capture the far-right viewers slowly being led towards The Daily Wire by Caviezel and his ilk. But in a world where Top Gun: Maverick was beloved by people of every stripe, the secret ingredient Ghost Soldier seems to be missing is baseline competence.

As Fitz pulls out one novel sci-fi gadget after another—an invisibility cloak; an exploding magnetic doohickey; a gun that unspools molten string—they’re deployed for only a few fleeting seconds each, and often without real setup. It would be a much livelier film if we could actually feel the impact of these weapons, or anticipate them, or even see them, but Ghost Soldier is little more than a collection of vague action-movie ideas strung together without effort or emotion. Surely even conservative moviegoers deserve better than such a drag.

Director: William Eubank
Writer: Chris Papasadero
Starring: Jim Caviezel, Olivia Thirlby, Beau Knapp, Garret Dillahunt, Shea Whigham
Release Date: November 11, 2026

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