The Killer’s Game
For a long time, many wrestlers have wanted to ditch the ring and make it on the big screen. I happen to be a fan of Bautista, who, over the past few years, has developed into a truly engaging screen presence. Not only is he frightening and large enough to be believable in action pictures, but more than that he possesses an enormous talent for humor as well! He shone in the “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies and in “Glass Onion.” And even when all he had to do was act in a dramatic role in “Blade Runner 2049,” he carried himself with an understated dignity that is similar to the talented actor Robert Forster. Even when he is appearing in decidedly mediocre and even terrible films like the “My Spy” films BAUTISTA IS WATCHABLE. Bautista is as entertaining as he’s always been in the disastrous action-comedy Killer’s Game, but not this time. He fails to stop this mess from becoming an hour and forty minutes of blood soaked despair.
He plays the role of Joe Flood, a retired cold blooded assassin who now seeks refuge in Budapest. Don’t worry, for he is the perhaps the most ethical such character to hit the screen in many a moon he only targets individuals who deserve to die; otherwise, he has a strong moral code when it comes to his assignments, and he has the likes of Ben Kingsley, the man who played Gandhi, in the shoes of Zvi, his trainer. This gifted man while still at the ballet studio massacre catches an eye of Maise (Sofia Boutella) the lead dancer with whom he forms a bond and romance that instils the hope of change and retirement as he feels he has “a newfound respect for life” that would be better suited in a parody of a hitman film.
Regrettably, Joe has become the victim of insufferable migraines and his patient’s physician claims that Joe has an insidious genetic degenerative disease and has a prognosis of three months to live.
In order to spare Maize the sight of his own downfall, he entertains the option of ending his life with a hired gun, which Zvi, who was his only option, refuses. He seeks out another contract hit lady, Marianna (Pom Klementieff), to do the job. Due to her father being one of the countless people Joe has killed in the past, she is more than willing to recruit individuals to fulfill the task. Sadly, right when the assassin’s buyout goes into effect it doesn’t matter! a doctor informs Joe that there was a mistake in the lab and he is completely unwell. When Joe tries to cancel the contract, Marianna does not only dismiss his request but also invites a plethora of assassins and soldiers of fortune.
Movies often use the “hire a hit man but change your mind and can’t cancel the contract” motif. This scenario has been found in episodes of many movies, and was also the storyline in “The Odd Job” (1978), a film directed by Graham Chapman. The storyline also feature extensively in Warren Beatty’s Bulworth. However, there is no originality or creativity with this film, for example, how screenwriters Rand Ravich and James Coyne took inspiration from the novel written by Jay R. Bonnansinga. After that film begins to progress, it becomes a sequence where Joe overcomes a number of hirelings, including a lesbian stripping duo, two Scottish brothers who speak gibberish and the world’s most dangerous K-pop girl group, whom he defeats through shooting, stabbing or blowing up, illustrated in a very violent style that makes the violence in a John Wick movie look like children’s drama.
Such issues could have been pardoned if these battles were shown with the kind of kinetic visuals and adrenaline rush that those films had, but they are carried out by J. J. Perry, who wore the ‘Day Shift’ as a badge of honor, in the way one might shoot a documentary messy and loud, but lifeless. This is made even worse by the excessive use of ‘bad movie’ cliches such as unrealistic computer generated splashes of fake slasher style blood.
Even in these mostly dire circumstances, Bautista does the best he can with the hand (among other body parts flying around) on display and whatever degree that the film does work is due almost entirely to his efforts. My guess is that even though he must have realized doing something like this was probably a step backwards after appearing in more ambitious works such as the numerous MCU films, the two “Dune” films and even “Knock at the Cabin,” he was still resolute in wanting to do his best and as a result, they are more bearable than they would otherwise be. As for the rest of the cast, there are a number of strong personalities among them (including Terry Crews as one of the hired killers) but they are mostly wasted the fiery Boutella is rushed into the role of the concerned girlfriend, Kingsley is obviously sleepwalking through his part and those who were looking for a lot of action between Bautista and his co-star Klementieff will be disappointed because the two are onscreen for no more than a couple of minutes together.
An equally chilling and predictable film, “The Killer’s Game” is such a ‘made for a particular market’ type of movie that the most astonishing thing is the fact that it is being screened in theaters, rather than going straight to streaming, where it would have been buried in the algorithm and no one would have cared for its existence anyway. However, Bautista’s case is quite disappointing as even at a fairly preliminary phase of his screen career he surely deserves something of better quality than what was offered to him this time. Perhaps, by the time Bautista turns into a notable movie star, he will be able to rest assured that most of the universe has erased every evidence of this film’s creation. In fact, by then, most people might even forget that it was created all together.
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