3/10
Do you ever wonder what you would do if, after three years of marriage, you discovered that your husband was a hitman? No, me neither.
What I do wonder is how a film as flabby and charmless as this gets made. Is there some kind of quota for completely pointless films that get released for no better reason than to keep the numbers up? And if you think that's a rhetorical question, you're wrong.
If there are as many hitmen in real life as there are in movies, it's a wonder there's anyone left alive, but even by the basement standards of hitman movies, this is a dud. It's also not unlike Mr and Mrs Smith (Brangelina movie from a few years back) and very like Knight & Day (a Cruise/Diaz film due later this summer), which in turn resembles Salt (with Angelina) also out later this year. In other words, it's a circle of repetition with originality as rare as a unicorn.
But perhaps I should tell you about Killers, to save you the trouble of going to see it. Katherine Heigl is a recently-dumped woman on holiday with her parents when she meets hunky Ashton Kutcher. They meet cute, date, hang out, do the do, and then it's three years later and they're married. Which is when the hitman thing (he was one but has retired) comes into play. It's a lame excuse for car chases, fights with rival killers and squabbling with a wife who was unaware of his previous occupation. The comedy is not funny, the romance is not touching and the action scenes are not thrilling. Ashton Kutcher has the charisma of a comatose cucumber, and Heigl resorts to screaming and waving her hands around. People are killed with no sense of pain; alcohol abuse is good for a laugh, and the only tiny redeeming feature is seeing Tom Selleck, which indicates quite how desperate I was to find anything good.
Oh yes, and in case you wondered, there is only one good hitman film, and it's called Grosse Pointe Blank. See it, not this.
