Oh, romantic comedies. I’m starting to see a pattern. Reality is not important for a romantic comedy. What is important are certain set pieces, situations, or jokes. the actual plot doesn’t matter. I know they’re very popular, yet like Lifetime movies, aren’t expected to be very good. It’s this particular point I don’t understand. There’s nothing inherently wrong with the idea of a romantic comedy. I’m a guy. I like romance. I like comedy. Why is it so hard to find a good, smart film that is both smart and have romantic overtones/themes? I’d rather watch and enjoy a GOOD romantic comedy with my wife, instead of sitting there watching a bad movie, and annoying her with my eye rolls and guffaws.
Friday night, we had a date night planned after all the school Halloween school parades and parties. We would drop off the kids for the evening, then catch dinner and a movie. Logistically, this didn’t work out as well as we hoped, so decided to go out for a sushi dinner, then come home to watch something streaming at home. We didn’t see anything we liked, so settled on Killers on FiOS Video on Demand. Sadly, we watched it on standard definition, not HD (couldn’t find HD movies.) Painful for me on many levels.
Killers stars Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl, with smaller roles for a number of actors and actresses like Tom Selleck, Catherine O’Hara, and others who must participate in these types of films for the money — it can’t be the artistic value. To summarize the plot, Kutcher is an assassin who meets Heigl’s character in Nice (France) during a job — you know, an assassination. They fall in love, and three years later, they are married, living in surburbia, and living average Joe-type married lives. All of a sudden, there’s a $20 million bounty on Ashton’s head, and killers come out of the woodwork to collect the bounty. Big spoiler here — some of these killers are their own neighbors. Dum dum DUM!
I didn’t like this movie because I thought it wasn’t very good. Frankly, the plot was convoluted, and didn’t make a lot of sense. I found the relationship dynamics/chemistry between the two characters boring once they got married. The sheer number of their neighbors/friends who are contracted killers, all living in proximity to them, was unbelievable. I mean, really, all these people are killers? Was their sole responsibility to sit and wait for three years or more, just in case they had to kill Ashton Kutcher? Do they get paid to sit and wait?
Finally, I didn’t find the whole Kutcher-as-an-assassin to be believable. As a guy, I’ve watched my share of movies about cold-blooded assassins. Ashton Kutcher was a joke as an assassin. His entire mannerisms didn’t match the personality of someone would kill people for money. In this movie, Ashton Kutcher is a goofy assassin that women wouldn’t be appalled with — handsome and isn’t threatening. He’s a killer that doesn’t kill often, has a conscious, and WIN WIN!, he has boyish charm. I don’t personally know any real-life assassins, but I’m pretty sure contract killers are assholes with personalities that don’t work well within stable long-term relationships. Furthermore, once the action starts and the killers come out of the woodwork, he’s a terrible fighter. All of a sudden, he’s a joke, and the action is a mere backdrop so that Heigl and Kutcher’s characters can bicker about their relationship. The finale came together quickly, but the resolution was abrupt.
I didn’t like this movie. I’m disappointed, and I’m confounded that Hollywood studios can’t hire smart writers to write decent movies that have both romance and comedy. Ironically, after the film was over, we browsed through the FiOS On Demand menu, and found the HD version of Killers, plus other movies. This was our first On Demand purchase, so lesson learned, now we know where to find the HD movies for rent. Doh!
On a random note, in the movie poster below, doesn’t Ashton Kutcher’s hair look like a toupee?