As it happened, the night before I saw this I took in Heist (2001), written and directed by playwright David Mamet, and that suffers from the same irretrievable condition as this. Characters who can’t stop yakking and directors without a cinematic bone in their bodies. These are little more than filmed plays with the playwright stretching and stretching with his endless words to find the bon mot that moviegoers will be repeating for years and might enter the “greatest line” hit parade. In Heist it was “the thing.”
Here, there isn’t a line that’s memorable. “I don’t know what means” in I Play Rocky hit the mark for reasons audiences won’t even understand. Quentin Tarantino would know. He can write the memorable line.
If director Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin, 2022) understood cinema he would have started with his hero picking a moth off a wall and shepherding it outside and then later, when it was raining, finding some way of preserving the moth from the rain. That’s how to introduce an interesting character, not just have him tell you. Show, not tell, is as much a mantra of the movies as in written fiction. Didn’t F. Scott Fitzgerald, or the character representing him, arguably the greatest American writer of the 20th century, not get an object lesson in this in Elia Kazan’s The Last Tycoon (1976).
I’m sorry to be a party-pooper given this has ridden in on a wave of praise and stars with a shedload of Oscar nominees, but this is a glorified yak-fest and a lazy one at that. Taking a pop at American foreign policy might endear you to the critics, but it’s just camouflage for a movie that has little to say and the determination to say it. Once we descended into JFK conspiracy theories it totally lost me.
I know quirky characters aren’t meant to be logical but explain to me a fellow who takes note of the Catholic dictat that suicide is a big no-no but ignores that other inconvenient rule Thou Shalt Not Kill and whose hit rate in that direction is over 60. Maybe we’re meant to feel sympathy for an assassin dying of cancer because he’s a successful hitman. To be honest I’d prefer the more unpretentious trope of hitman wanting to retire a la Stiletto (1969).
Chris (John Malkovich) must have an iron constitution because, despite never having been exposed to a very serious drug, he can tolerate a daily injection of morphine better than his junkie boss MJ (Steve Buscemi), an addict who still hasn’t built up an immunity to the stuff, falling asleep after injections.
I guessed right away that the presence of the two girls they meet at the airport wasn’t accidental. And the what’s-in-the-box trope has long lost its power after Seven (1995) took the crown after sticking a human head in it. And don’t get me started on the absurd Monument Valley scene. Whether this was homage to John Ford or just the writer couldn’t think of anything more ridiculous I couldn’t care less.
The most believable character was Margie (Parker Posey), the unfaithful alcoholic wife of Lee (Sam Rockwell), Chris’s longtime buddy and travelling companion and assassin (with a less significant, comparatively speaking, body count to his name) who has promised to off the hitman so that he doesn’t have to compromise his religion.
There is a horse by the way, though I didn’t count whether it qualified as “Horse No 9” and in the only bleak part of the black comedy is that after it takes a shine to Chris in the most maudlin fashion imaginable (even Disney wouldn’t have dared stoop so low), he’s responsible for accidentally killing it.
Despite a campaign gathering pace behind John Malkovich (In the Line of Fire, 1993) for a Oscar, I think he, along with Rockwell and Buscemi are miscast. Malkovich has been world-weary since he was born. There’s nothing new in his performance, but a more weighted more of the same. Sam Rockwell (Argylle, 2024) and Steve Buscemi (Reservoir Dogs, 1992) are just the same over-acting actors they’ve always been. Only Parker Posey (Dazed and Confused, 1993) steps away from her screen persona.
I’ve only enjoyed one film from Martin McDonagh and that was because Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) had a decent story.
Black comedy maybe, but the joke’s on the audience.
