Killers – Review

Men of a certain age: remember when you went to pick up a girl for a date and you had to meet her parents, the father is always really quiet and is either sharpening his knives or cleaning out his guns? The concerned father routine with the curious glare, you know, that old tale? That’s the Killers, only cranked up with a $70 million budget and starring Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher. Now I’m a little older, so I don’t have to meet the father until like date number 10, but I always found that scenario charming in a tired sort of way, but there’s nothing really charming about Killers. It’s a flat, emotionless, by-the-numbers film, that soon becomes a tedious exercise in will power not to be too mean about what you’re seeing.

Jennifer Kornfeldt (Heigl) has just been dumped, so her parents decide to take her to Nice, France to just get away and cut loose. Spencer Aimes (Kutcher) is a top-secret spy who wants a normal life doing normal, routine tasks. They meet, fall in love, he then wants out of the spy gig, but his employer says “no“. He disobeys, marries Jen, and has a happy little existence as a construction supervisor (how did he get that job?). But soon, as he nears his birthday, something seems off. Maybe it’s because unbeknown to him, there’s a $20 million dollar reward on his head, and everyone he has ever known is out to get him. Oh, and he must save his marriage because Jen can’t handle him as a spy.

If you were a little bored reading that synopsis, I feel you, because it was boring writing it. Killers has a stale, leftovers feel to it, and does little to excite or be original. If it isn’t Jen’s (Heigl) odd relationship with her dad (played by Tom Selleck), where she still seeks permission (what is she? 15 or 30?) for everything, to the messy unresolved plot, to the limp climax of a round table discussion between father and son-in-law, it all proves Killers is an effortless bore. Worse yet, is the charm Heigl has brought to films like Knocked Up or The Ugly Truth is absent and the goodwill Kutcher got from Spread is gone, and combined the two have no on-screen chemistry. I’ll just blame the cliched screenplay that took the True Lies type of idea, and numbed it down for the Twitter generation. It’s like being around some of the richest people in the world and you walked in dressed up for a jog. Oh, the looks and glares they would give you. You would have felt like an inch big. That’s the Killers; a film so into itself, it’s not fun being around with, and I don’t like being sneered at.

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