Dir. Jonathan Lynn, UK/France, 2010, 98 mins
Cast: Bill Nighy, Emily Blunt, Rupert Grint
Review by Carol Allen
This is the English language remake of a French comedy Cible émouvante (1993) , which starred Jean Rochefort and Guilliame Depardieu, and it's certainly refreshing to have such a remake set in England and made in English instead of American, as is usually the case. It also benefits from a first class cast.
Nighy plays Victor, a middle aged professional assassin. He's the top man in his profession, which is a family tradition, handed down from father to son. His life is though solitary, dominated by his imperious mother (Eileen Atkins), who rules him from her armchair in an old people's home. Victor's rigidly controlled routine is disrupted, when he finds himself attracted to one of his intended victims Rose (Blunt), whom he's been commissioned to assassinate by art collector Ferguson (Rupert Everett), who is seeking revenge for a scam that Rose has pulled on him. Totally against form Victor spares her life, in the process acquiring a young apprentice Tony (Grint), who believes that Victor is a private detective. The three are then on the run from Ferguson and his men, who want the money and their lives.
The first ten or fifteen minutes of the film are brilliant - very stylish and beautifully timed, right from the opening assassination, which sets up the situation with Victor walking coolly out of a hotel after a corpse has just fallen from above, and there's some delightful comic business involving a parrot which almost outshines the famous Monty Python sketch. The jokes are coming thick and fast. But after Victor's first meeting with Rose and Tony, the film loses some of its comic momentum and never quite regains that opening energy. There is though still a lot in it to enjoy with plenty of good comic moments, some of them involving Gregor Fisher as Ferguson's hapless, put upon sidekick.
Nighy is perfectly cast as Victor, whose mother's suggestion that his solitary state is because he could be gay (even though he's not) is, is supported by the fact that, despite his profession, he's a bit of a twitchy old woman, who keeps plastic covers on the furniture in his house to avoid damage. And the short sighted blink the actor adopts is particularly funny in view of his skill with the firearms. Grint is likeable as his apprentice but the mentor/pupil, surrogate father/son relationship between them is a bit under developed.
The balance has been altered from the French original to put more emphasis on the love affair between the Victor and Rose and while Blunt is engaging as the amoral, annoying and ultimately little girl lost, the May and December romance doesn't quite convince. Martin Freeman also pops up in an unusual role for him as the smiling sadistic assassin Dixon, who craves Victor's number one spot in the assassination world and his dumb sidekick Fabian (Geoff Bell) is particularly funny. While Eileen Atkins as Mother steals every scene she is in.
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