Comedy is the Victim of 'Killers'
That’s the problem with wrong turns. Once you make one, you inevitably make a lot more before you find yourself right again.
Such is the progress, such as it is, of “Killers,” a screwball comedy that starts out well but quickly goes terribly wrong.
The current way to make screwball comedies relevant to the 21st century is to add a lot of violence and shoot it in a way that, to our proudly jaded modern eyes, seems funny. And so “Killers” begins with a winning, though not altogether unfamiliar, premise: Katherine Heigl marries the man of her dreams, Ashton Kutcher, only to learn that he was a contract killer for the CIA, some members of which now want him dead.
For this movie to work, you need clever jokes and exciting action sequences. But after a few promising scenes, the jokes become progressively worse. And the action scenes are uniformly perfunctory, often repetitive and always dull. They could have been taken out of any routine television cop show from the ’70s, particularly the Quinn Martin Productions that always featured Ford cars (the movie also shows a couple of Volvos, but, lest we forget, Volvo is owned by Ford).
As always, Heigl seems like an appealing performer, but once again she never quite clicks with the audience. Part of her problem, of course, is that she habitually chooses awful material for her movies — and this time, she is even working with the same loser director (Robert Luketic) who made her megaflop “The Ugly Truth.” The other part is that her undeniable charisma and her evident talent somehow do not appear to mesh in quite the right way to make her a star.
Kutcher here is impressively muscled, but he has oddly picked up a Keanu Reeveseque monotone that does not serve him well. Still, he looks great in a Ferrari (yes, that’s not a Ford) speeding around the hairpin turns of the French Riviera. He does the James Bond part of the role well, but the part that requires sincerity or emotion is a little weak.
Better are Catherine O’Hara and Tom Selleck as Heigl’s parents. O’Hara has the two best lines, one at the beginning and one toward the end, but hers is a one-joke character and the joke very quickly gets old. As the father who takes an instant dislike to Kutcher, Selleck reminds us of what made him a star 30 years ago. It’s good to have him back.
Writers Bob DeRosa and Ted Griffin have a good idea on their hands, but they don’t quite seem to know what to do with it. If they were funnier or had a better sense of action, “Killers” would be a winner. Instead, they settle down in the seat of their Ford and make one wrong turn after another.
-- Dan Neman, former movie critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, reviews movies every week here at www.TheBoomerMagazine.com. He also writes the “Silver Screen with Dan Neman” column in each issue of Boomer magazine.
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