Review of Killshot (2008) by Jack C — 04 Apr 2009

From what I recall of the Elmore Leonard novel, this should have made a great movie. I read it years ago, so I'm not sure how faithful the movie is to the book, but it definitely fails to deliver the goods as a thriller.

It has an interesting cast, with Mickey Roarke as Armand 'The Blackbird' Degas, an icy cool hitman for the Toronto(!) mafia, Diane Lane and Thomas Jane as Cameron and Wayne Colson, the estranged husband and wife he is hunting, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Richie Nix, the loose-cannon sidekick he picks up along the way.

Rosario Dawson also stars as Richie's girlfriend Donna. They're all fine actors, with the possible exception of Jane, who tends to be fairly one-dimensional. And Roarke and Lane in particular give pretty good performances here.

I think the problem lies with the screenplay by Hossein Amini (The Four Feathers) and the direction by John Madden (Shakespeare in Love). The film remains quite pedestrian throughout, and never really takes flight.

Put this material in the hands of someone like Quentin Tarantino to adapt (see Jackie Brown) or Steven Soderbergh to direct (see Out of Sight), and you would have a completely different animal. Tarantino knows how to translate great fictional characters from the page to the screen, but the characters in Killshot are mostly wooden and unemotional.

Seeing Gordon-Levitt thrash about in an attempt to seem crazy and menacing is just not very interesting. But it does make you appreciate even more the performances of Samuel L. Jackson and Robert De Niro in Jackie Brown, and Don Cheadle in Out of Sight.

You 'believe' those characters. Those films were laced with a fair amount of humour as well, and Killshot could certainly have used some of that. It's just a very predictable thriller, with characters that you don't really care about.

Well, except for Diane Lane's character. I've loved her ever since I saw her in Lonesome Dove, and I'd hate to see anything bad happen to her. But, I never believed she'd come to any harm, even when she was in the clutches of the two killers.

Even when the slobbering, out-of-control Richie was forcing her to undress, I couldn't really hate him for it. She's looking fine for 44 years old, and she gets the film an extra half-star. But, if you don't believe the bad guys have any hope whatsoever of succeeding, then the movie is drained of any tension, and simply limps along toward it's predictable Hollywood ending.

Which is too bad, because in the right hands this could have been dynamite.