Ashton Kutcher's Killers is about as generic as action-romance movies can get. It features short bursts of cool scenes mixed in with a tired script, bad acting, and flat chemistry between the leads. The laughs are few and far between and the romance angle is never believable; not even for a second. So does that mean the movie is a complete wash?
Jen (Katherine Heigl) is a recently single girl who goes on vacation to Nice, France with her parents to forget all her troubles. Meanwhile Spencer, an undercover CIA operative, is on an assassination mission which also happens to take place in Nice. The two have a fateful encounter in an elevator that ends with the pair being smitten with each other. They have flirt, have dinner, and get married shortly thereafter. In fact, I'd say it's a little too short because the film doesn't really build up chemistry between the two or show the lapsing of time. Instead it just picks up three years after the fact.
Spencer has attempted to quit his old gig and go legit by running a construction business. Jen has no clue he used to be an assassin, however, their quiet suburban life changes when Spencer's old boss contacts him for a new job. Soon people in his life he thought were friends turn out to be assassins for hire, attempting to collect on a twenty million dollar bounty. His co-workers and neighbors go out of their way to put a bullet in his head. Naturally Jen walks into this part of his life and things get messy from that point on.
Jen goes along for the ride and accepts the assassin part of Spencer's resume a little too easily. It's handled tongue in cheek with jabs and jokes about their marriage peppered in between. It's kind of painful to watch in parts and the plot only gets worse towards the end when additional predictable elements are dropped into the film. The finale is even worse and makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. There's no clean resolution and no adequate explanation for what happened. The film just kind of ends on a "huh" note.
It's unfortunate that just about everything about Killers deadpans. Starting with the script, which is simply not good, the movie snowballs from one plot hole to the next. Weak dialogue, lackluster jokes, and twists in the story just never materialized in a way the producers of this film thought they would. Heigl is completely underutilized here and she has virtually no presence on the screen. Kutcher isn't strong enough for a lead roll, and when the two are on the screen together it's just awkward and flat. For having such a small roll in the film Tom Selleck actually stands out with the best performance, and that's not saying much.
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Article comments
1 - Steve
I agree that it is a bad movie. We watched it at the in-laws house on their Netflix account and it was a good waster of 1.5 hours. One of those movies that starts out alright with some promise and ends quickly with a really bad plot line.