The overall movie storyline is solid and decent, one reminiscent of an action version of The Russia House (1990) that starred Sean Connery and Michelle Pfeiffer based on the spy craftsman himself, John le Carre's novel. Yet as an adaptation into a movie, Soul Assassin has too weak points in its effort. There is a great energetic, pounding Euro-trash sound track that goes well with the locale. There is good cinematography and creative photographic work as well as a nice use of variable film speeds. Yet at some point, the continuing fancy camera work begins to intrude becoming more foreground of the movie instead of the story and performances themselves, sort of like saying see how great and neat a filmmaker I am. Instead of enhancing the story, the constant reminders of the different ways of filming the story seem to become more important than the story itself.
There are other theatrical problems with the movie including the "Hold it!" phrase used by Skeet Ulrich as Kevin Burke at the beginning of the movie along with some other dumb, unintelligent dialogue in this movie. The inter-edited flashbacks of a death scene which during a knife fight were more distracting to both the fighter much less than to the audience. It use was overly cute and unrealistic. There's the rather foolish script decision to go barefoot for who knows how long, to not even try to use a disguise when one's face is plastered throughout town, and the continue dumb idea of going exposed in public. Such excursions into irrationality are probably more of a script device to allow more supposedly unnecessary exciting action chase scenes which unfortunately in one instance turns into a comedic farce. Later in the movie the good guys just don't seem to the have smarts that make for an appealing movie which may be more due to an script and director effort as an excuse to keep up the dramatic action sequences instead of making use of a more intelligent, captivating movie script. An excellent example of competent intelligence operator was scripted for and portrayed by Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State (1998).
Interesting use of an intermittent team of operatives, but It's not portrayed to its full potential. Then there are moments were more than a few operatives would have been expected to have been in play for a number of scenes. Even the nicely emotive ending could have been finesse a bit more with an even greater impact. This movie could have easily been an eight or even a nine but there are just too many flaws that detract from the totality of this movie making it more a seven more unfortunately.
There are other theatrical problems with the movie including the "Hold it!" phrase used by Skeet Ulrich as Kevin Burke at the beginning of the movie along with some other dumb, unintelligent dialogue in this movie. The inter-edited flashbacks of a death scene which during a knife fight were more distracting to both the fighter much less than to the audience. It use was overly cute and unrealistic. There's the rather foolish script decision to go barefoot for who knows how long, to not even try to use a disguise when one's face is plastered throughout town, and the continue dumb idea of going exposed in public. Such excursions into irrationality are probably more of a script device to allow more supposedly unnecessary exciting action chase scenes which unfortunately in one instance turns into a comedic farce. Later in the movie the good guys just don't seem to the have smarts that make for an appealing movie which may be more due to an script and director effort as an excuse to keep up the dramatic action sequences instead of making use of a more intelligent, captivating movie script. An excellent example of competent intelligence operator was scripted for and portrayed by Gene Hackman in Enemy of the State (1998).
Interesting use of an intermittent team of operatives, but It's not portrayed to its full potential. Then there are moments were more than a few operatives would have been expected to have been in play for a number of scenes. Even the nicely emotive ending could have been finesse a bit more with an even greater impact. This movie could have easily been an eight or even a nine but there are just too many flaws that detract from the totality of this movie making it more a seven more unfortunately.