Killshot (2008) – on rental. This was another film that I think had a short theatrical run in Singapore. It was released, then disappeared off theatrical screening lists before much people noticed it.
The film centers on a device plot that’s shown up countless times already: that of persons who witness murders committed by assassins, and are now placed in the FBI’s witness protection program. As these stories must go, the program must be ineffective, and the assassins must eventually catch up to the witnesses, and there must be a show down.
What’s at least semi-different though are the characters. Not the witnesses – played by onscreen couple Thomas Jane (who I remember from The Punisher) and Diane Lane, an actress who’s dangerously close to getting typecast from the roles she’s been in the last half-decade.
Rather, it’s the two assassins’ characterization that’s refreshing. You have an aging hired gun who’s all ice cold and professional, and played by Mickey Rouke in an Indian hair-do. He’s a mentor of sorts to an almost psychotic and loose cannon apprentice-assassin played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, and whom I’ve not seen before in the films I’ve watched.
The highpoint for me in this film by the numbers was the interactions between the two, though at the film’s conclusion, the ‘turn’ in the two’s relationship isn’t surprising at all – though from the film’s standpoint, it’s pretty obvious the director had intended the turn to be a surprise.
Thankfully, the show isn’t gory. The two wreck quite a bit of havoc throughout the film’s length, offing characters and bystanders and civilians, execution-style. But much of that violence is shown either off-camera, or the position smartly deflects demonstration of blood and brains getting splattered all over.
On balance, it’s a little slow in parts, story nothing especially different from the norm, and Lane isn’t in a role too dissimilar to what she’s done before. Worth a watch only if you’re interested in Rouke and/or Gordon-Levitt going at and with each other.
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