Dave Bautista deserves so much better than THE KILLER’S GAME, (based on the book of the same name by Jay Bonansinga). What is translated to the screen is a misguided effort that essays several tones without ever settling successfully on one. Bautista is an actor that has shown himself to be more than the cartoon character he plays in the GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY franchise. One is put in mind of his dramatic work in KNOCK AT THE CABIN DOOR, and his fine comedic turn in GLASS ONION. Yet, here he is let down by a director that fails him with pacing that is non-existent, and by a script boasting dialogue that is a dull as dishwater. Neither one was up to the task of putting over this tale of a good-hearted hitman finding love and a negative prognosis at virtually the same time. If it weren’t for Terry Crews as a rival hitman livening things up with Motown quotes and his own sense of style and gestalt, there would be little to recommend it at all.
Song lyrics loom large in the story that also features Sir Ben Kingsley as Zvi (Hebrew for sweet), the coffee-stirring schmaltz of an agent to Bautista’s Joe Flood. Zvi favors Dolly Parton while offering life coaching to his star assassin who is facing a crossroads after falling for Maize (Sofia Boutella) the lissome ballerina he met at his latest hit. As he contemplates getting out of the game, he receives a dire diagnosis for headaches and double-vision he’s been suffering (as we suffer through a particularly irking sound effect that proclaims that pain in the head to us). With three months to live, he does the stand-up thing and takes out a contract with rival agent, the lolly-loving gamine-fatale Antoinette (Pom Klementieff) to take him out cleanly, and he gets a promise from Zvi that the agent will take care of Maize. He also breaks up with her just before the contract is set to activate, to spare her having to see his decline. Good-hearted, right?
Unfortunately, the doctor made a mistake, and Joe is told that he is not going to die, but maybe should have his eyes examined.
From there the film becomes a gazillion ways to die in Mitteleuropa. From all over the world, assassins gleefully arrive in Joe’s home base of Hungary and less gleefully shuffle off this mortal coil as he terminates them when Antoinette, who harbors a grudge, refuses to cancel the contract. Blood spurts, bones crunch, and a split is performed that has nothing to do with being limber as director J.J. Perry fills the screen with carnage when he runs out of what were some slick editing choices at the beginning of his effort. Bautista provides a sweet and earnest note to the proceedings that balances his character’s professional ethics and personal life. In a better script, he would have been allowed the option of playing straight man to the kooky characters that populate his world, letting the audience know that he is in on the joke instead of being reduced to obliviousness to their eccentricities. That one can still enjoy Alex Kingston as Zvi’s ebullient and oversharing wife, or the slow burn Crews’ Lovedahl with the incompetent assassin wannabe (George Somner) forced on him by Antoinette is a testament to the skill of those actors. There’s also the sardonic Irish priest tending a flock in Hungary who gets caught up in the carnage, showing us exactly how Bautista’s character should have been written with a fine edge of dry wit. The rest are stock characters barely air-brushed into the proceedings.
Alas.
As for the story, it just rolls along towards a climax in which we learn that the Hungarian countryside provides vacant castles that are just dandy for an all-out assassin show-down, and that those castles have the structural integrity to withstand explosions of varying strengths. It’s as much of a letdown as the action sequences that precede it in which assassins (contacted via an app, of course) each try to take Joe down and fail in tiresomely similar ways that use only slight regional variations in their, ahem, execution. They are gory but are to the refined choreography of Peckinpah or Woo as is an under-rehearsed clog dance with one clog doing the same three moves (badly) ad infinitum, ad nauseum.
As for plot holes, suffice to say that at one point Joe, a professional assassin with 20 years’ experience and the unqualified respect of his peers, can’t find a way to arm himself with a gun.
Sigh.
KILLER’S GAME tries so hard to be a frothy frolic through homicide and mayhem but can’t find its way to that consummation so devoutly to be wished. Leave us all move on from the debacle and speak of it no more.
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