I currently have an AMC A-List membership, so I’ve been trying to see a bunch of movies I’d normally pass on (movies are an expensive hobby!). So that’s how, on a random weeknight, I ended up at the Dave Bautista/Sofia Boutella vehicle The Killer’s Game. Bautista plays Joe Flood, a contract killer (the best!) who only kills bad guys, we are assured. In the course of a job he meets Sofia Boutella’s Maize, a ballet dancer. He’s immediately smitten (wouldn’t you be?), and they become a couple.
This leads to what might be the best part of the movie – Dave Bautista being a doting boyfriend in a henley. He made comments a few years ago that he’d love to be in a rom com but had never been asked, and it’s clear from this part of The Killer’s Game that he could handle it.
After getting a terminal medical diagnosis (Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease for you House watchers), Joe decides to end his own life by taking out a contract on himself so Maize will get his life insurance. His own handler won’t do it (Zvi, played by Ben Kingsley), so he goes to Pom Klementieff’s Marianna Antoinette (really). She’s more than happy to put it on the wire, because Joe killed her Dad, which of course won’t come back to bite him.
BUT! The diagnosis was a mistake! Joe’s not dying! Too late though, every hitman cliche is now chasing him. There’s the Scottish brothers who are subtitled, a Korean gang who, if I remember correctly we meet singing karaoke, a pair of British strippers, and a Spanish guy who dances and fights. It’s all very dated in a “some of this is probably offensive but we’re going with it” sort of way. The non-Bautista humor is definitely stuck in the 90s, with Pom’s Marianna making crude sex jokes to her subordinate which would’ve been the height of hilarity in a late 90s/early 2000s action movie.
The big climax stretches over two sites. One is a castle where Joe is able to set up Home Alone traps that take out professional killers. He succeeds but Maize is hurt so he retreats to a church, patches her up, and convinces the priest to marry them. That is interrupted by the final fight against Marianna’s main thug, and her comeuppance at the hands of Zvi for “breaking the rules”.
I wish I could say it’s worth a rental or a purchase, because I love the cast (and definitely support Bautista in a rom com), but look for it on a streaming platform you already pay for in the near future.
Leave a Reply