Wednesday, July 27, 2011

3 Short Paragraphs: Killers


2010, Robert Luketic (heh. even the poster for his other Heigl flick looks the same) -- download

I am mixed up in how I feel about light hearted movies about assassins. I loved the epitome of the mini-genre, Grosse Pointe Blank, but in general the topic makes me uncomfortable. How can you be light-hearted about someone who kills for money? And how the fuck can it be a rom-com? The only Hollywood trope seems to be having the killer suffer from burnout and then fall in love. Only love can rescue you from the difficult life of killing people.

Like many movies, this one has three acts. Act One, Killer meets Beautiful Blonde. Act Two, Killer and Blonde get married and Live in Suburbia. Act Three; Suburbia tries to Kill Them. This movie gets around the whole messy part where our Killer might do something messy like "his job" and moves him to suburbia almost immediately. And he makes a killing in the construction business (hyuk hyuk) only to be discovered and attacked by a near-endless stream of not-neighbors trying to kill him. So, it's OK if he kills them in tons of creative, entertaining ways -- they were trying to kill him first. It doesn't matter if these were his neighbors and friends and coworkers for the better part of a year. Groan.

Black Comedies do it best when they handle this subject because we will giggle with guilt at the predicaments our Killer is mixed up in. But I guess today's audience wants to just ignore morality of the situation and just be entertained by beautiful people killing not so beautiful people... and one very beautiful Katheryn Winnick. The Beauty (Heigl not Winnick, in case I lost you there) is supposed to represent our conflicted nature in watching the movie but considering her arguments are more about how the whole Killer thing is inconvenient, I am just not won over.

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