The premise of The Killer’s Game is that a hitman who has “played The Game” right–by not killing anyone who didn’t objectively deserve it in the crime world–meets a girl who makes him want to give up The Game and retire at the exact moment that he starts to notice splitting headaches that threaten to dull his edge. Doctor tells him he’s got three months to live and he decides to break things off with his girlfriend rather than have her witness him in a moment of vulnerability and then he essentially reaches out to his killer community for an assisted suicide, which is the exact moment that he receives a call telling him his test results are inaccurate and he can count on many more years of healthy living. It takes a little too much time to catch up to what takes the trailer all of about ninety seconds to sketch out, but Bestie, going in cold, was charmed by the action-romcom setup without knowing the turn.
Once the combat phase of the movie begins, the structure of those initial engagements is basically that two teams of assassins with a bunch of assassin tropes are dispatched simultaneously in order to kill Joe Flood–“just like at the circus,” Bestie mused in the drive home during our recap. Two competing teams show off their tricks and ultimately reveal some of the fatal weaknesses of their composition to the point of parody. One of my favorite observations of Bestie is her describing the way in which the Gojang assassins and the Biker brothers are composed in such a way that losing any single component of their gang makes the rest of the entire machine inoperable in a way that in retrospect makes them seem really fragile to start with. When Flood effortlessly disarms one of the Biker bros, the other brother is sort of powerless to do anything, because apparently their entire shtick is that they tie people up between their two motorcycles? They don’t even bring guns like the other people? And the Gojang assassins rush in one-by-one like one would expect from a pulpy kung fu movie, but here all the build up to the boss of the gang being the final battle is really neutralized by the fact that he doesn’t seem to have any powers beyond “being kind of surly and his little pocket knife,” as Bestie puts it. Adding insult to injury, he’s killed by a weapon wielded by one of his very own members. Shout out to the odango bubblegum assassin especially.
The magic of subtitles as euphemism for barely understandable Scottish is lovely in this movie and really subverts the use of subtitles in general when you’re able to pick up stray bawdy language which is missing in translation. Terry Crews is a show stealer, as is the opening sequence of Tonya and Ginny, complete with their own alcoholic beverages.
Bestie kept remarking on the “symptom presentation” of Sofia Boutella’s character, who seems to dip in and out of consciousness depending on when the plot needs her to rather than what her actual injuries are, and she actively fought against the suspension of disbelief in the final act’s chapel scene, which really stretches credulity for a number of reasons from the looooong wedding sequence to the language the priest speaks while in Bulgaria, to just about every piece of dialogue that occurs in that building.
The Killer’s Game delivers exactly what it teases, mindless action and a cute romcom montage and if you aren’t sure absolutely happy with that your standards are probably too high.
