Movies are sold based on the script. Then a director is selected to bring the script to life. Sometimes the director doesn't like the script - or doesn't understand the script - and takes the film in a completely different direction. The result is invariably a disaster: a hodgepodge of the writer's vision and the director's conflicting vision (think Congo where the director refused to read Crichton's book). Both the writer and director visions might work on their own, but jumbled together? Not a chance. This would seem to explain this film. Let's see if we can unpack it.
The script is an action film. The assassin premise and so forth should produce exciting action scenes. We don't get any - there's too few action scenes and what's there aren't exciting. That's on the director, who presumably didn't want to make an action film. There's some humor, which can work in a buddy type action film, but here it feels shoehorned in by a director who was handed comedians as his leads and didn't know what to do with them. This is understandable: the casting is so poor it is inexplicable. The last third of the movie is all director. The action script is tossed in favor of an ill-conceived eighties-style romantic comedy that doesn't work in part because the leads have zero chemistry. Neither the writer nor director deserve blame for the ending, which appears to have been parachuted in on studio notes. It's discordant and unsatisfying and not worth your time.
The editors did what they could to try to make this collection of disconnected scenes understandable, but they can't work miracles. Their best efforts could only produce a boring, tedious, plodding movie that starts off in one direction, changes course, meanders about for a good long while, before mercifully ending in the least satisfying way possible. I'm being exceedingly generous in giving this four stars, the stars earned by virtue of the film being too benign to hate. Four stars.
The script is an action film. The assassin premise and so forth should produce exciting action scenes. We don't get any - there's too few action scenes and what's there aren't exciting. That's on the director, who presumably didn't want to make an action film. There's some humor, which can work in a buddy type action film, but here it feels shoehorned in by a director who was handed comedians as his leads and didn't know what to do with them. This is understandable: the casting is so poor it is inexplicable. The last third of the movie is all director. The action script is tossed in favor of an ill-conceived eighties-style romantic comedy that doesn't work in part because the leads have zero chemistry. Neither the writer nor director deserve blame for the ending, which appears to have been parachuted in on studio notes. It's discordant and unsatisfying and not worth your time.
The editors did what they could to try to make this collection of disconnected scenes understandable, but they can't work miracles. Their best efforts could only produce a boring, tedious, plodding movie that starts off in one direction, changes course, meanders about for a good long while, before mercifully ending in the least satisfying way possible. I'm being exceedingly generous in giving this four stars, the stars earned by virtue of the film being too benign to hate. Four stars.