Killers kills genre single-handedly...

FIRST of all I would just like to stress that I hate Ashton Kutcher.

All chiseled, six-packed, handsome, witty and stuff. What an idiot.

So when I heard he was starring in a spy-cum-assassin movie I was the first in the queue to see him and his ridiculously perfect body shot by a Russian from a rooftop.

To be honest I’d have paid to see him shot in the abdomen with a spud-gun if I thought it might cause him some sort of discomfort but alas, I digress.

He stars alongside Katherine Heigl. The upside of seeing a Kutcher movie is that the lead female almost invariably is as annoying to women as Ashton is to us blokes - ie beautiful, smart etc, etc. And I think Heigl ticks all those boxes.

But then all notions of this ‘spy’ movie started evaporating.

Turns out this is a ‘spoof’ spy movie. Only nowhere near as good as Naked Gun or even Mr and Mrs Smith. In fact, the joke is on the boys who hauled their lady-friends to the pictures to see James Bond and instead got an awful ‘rom-com’.

Yes, womanising assassinating lothario who’ll never settle down meets girl – in a lift. Who he promptly marries.

Cue what seemed like an eternity of showing us just how ‘normal’ these two are. Forgive me, but I don’t go to the cinema to see normal, I go to see phantasmagoria dancing before me in hallucinogenic 24-flickers per second Jean Luc-Godard wonderment.

Meanwhile the spy who bored me has his past come back to haunt him, as it turns out he’s on some most wanted list.

In fact, he’s so wanted and the would-be killers are so ruthless and efficient that apparently they have been on his tail for yonks.

We’re led to believe it could be any one of the madly-in-love couple’s friends or family – or even the fruit man on the market. Whatever.

Jeebuz. I can suspend my disbelief for Star Wars’ metal men hobbling around the Millennium Falcon in outer space, but this was all just too much.

Of course we’re then taken on a cat and mouse carousel of slapstick capers with the supposedly imminent death of one or both of the pretty protagonists hovering like a dagger before them. And to take the Bard’s analogies one step further, something was rotten in that picturehouse.

The Lord knows I tried my damndest to remember that Kutcher never has been and never will be Morgan Freeman. I knew I was going to see a goofball gurning at the lens, but he’s usually played off against someone who, no matter how ridiculous the premise, makes you laugh.

And perhaps that’s where the problem lies. Perhaps that’s the whole point of the movie. The ‘madly-in-love’ lead relationship is about as believable as a BP CEO insisting there is no oil leak. That stuff coming out into the ocean is cola.

They’re like magnets - only at opposing poles of the chemistry spectrum in a movie that claims to be a romantic comedy.

So no romance, then. But neither is there any high-octane action to get excited about. So the potentially thrilling spy element is negated too.

By this time I noticed myself howling at the ceiling, making noises akin to something crossed between Chubaka and Oscar the Grouch.

The one saving grace for this movie is the pace that director Robert Luketic injects into the latter half.

Ceiling howls did make way for guilty giggles and sniggers in parts, but a smattering of stale set-pieces aside, there is nothing ‘Killer’ about this movie at all.

Bizarrely, the woman I am meant to be marrying very soon thought it was great. I have no idea how she came to draw this conclusion but I am now taking legal advice as to where I stand on the cancellation of the wedding.

Star rating H

by James Mitchinson

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