KILLERS

Directed by Robert Luketic
Written by Bob DeRosa & Ted Griffin
Stars: Ashton Kutcher, Katherine Heigl, Tom Selleck, Catherine O’Hara


Strangely echoing the premise and tone of the new Tom Cruise vehicle Knight and Day, the story begins with Jen Kornfeldt (Katherine Heigl) and her annoying parents Mr. Kornfeldt (Tom Selleck) and Mrs. Kornfeldt (Catherine O’Hara) arriving on the French Riviera to begin their dream holiday. After slipping the watchful eye of her controlling Dad (who’s clearly seen Meet The Parents a few times), she meets Spencer Aimes (Ashton Kutcher) in the hotel lift. He’s an uber-assassin on the payroll of the U.S. Government but unexpectedly he finds himself falling in love with Jen and contemplating marriage. Fast forward three years and the pair are living in wedded domestic bliss in suburbia. A call from his old Agency boss sends Spencer into a paranoid spin as he finds out that an unknown enemy has targeted him for assassination. So as the killers start coming out of the woodwork to collect the huge bounty on his head, there’s no one else to trust, except his wife.

After helming the abhorrent Legally Blonde films and the horrendous The Ugly Truth, then gaining some filmic credibility with the stylish gambling drama 21, Australian filmmaker Robert Luketic takes a flamethrower to his street-cred with this mind-bendingly awful effort. The concept does have comedic possibilities (as seen in True Lies) but Luketic explores hardly any of them, he’s totally out of his depth as an action filmmaker and saddled with the task of balancing the comedy and the action, he all but ruins many of the films major set pieces. The script is ludicrously overcooked with too much unnecessary exposition at the expense of laughs and Heigl’s habitual decision to play each role as a nostril-flaring, wild-eyed squealing shrew is growing very tiresome indeed.

POSEIDON (Blu Ray)

Directed by Wolfgang Petersen
Written by Mark Protosevich
Stars: Kurt Russell, Josh Lucas, Richard Dreyfuss, Jacinda Barrett

Since Wolfgang Petersen directed his World War Two masterpiece Das Boot he has (with the determination of an endurance athlete) inexorably slid towards cinematic mediocrity and abyssal-deep banality. It’s easy to trace his decline after the ‘Hitchcockian’ Shattered and the efficient thriller In The Line of Fire. Without warning came the execrable Air Force One, the leaden The Perfect Storm, culminating with Troy, a camp epic that managed to reduce one of literatures greatest tomes to scenery chewing and Brad Pitt’s glistening ab’s. Soonafter, Hollywood’s fuck-headed typing pool of banana-chewing Simian screenwriters flung a script onto Petersen’s doorstep, its story gouged from the plot of Ronald Neame’s 1972 ensemble epic The Poseidon Adventure, where a rag-tag group of misfits find their way to the surface through the wreckage of an upturned ocean liner when a ‘rogue wave’ flips it during New Years Eve celebrations. In this remake, the survivors struggling to get to the surface are career-gambler Dylan Johns (Josh Lucas), ex-New York Mayor Robert Ramsey (Kurt Russell), degenerate gambler Lucky Larry (Entourage’s ‘Johnny Drama’ Kevin Dillon), Richard Nelson (Richard Dreyfuss) and Maggie James (Jacinda Barrett). After numerous fiery set pieces, the group diminishes until a handful remains. Who lives? Who dies? Who cares? The extras are not bad, with a production assistant’s video diary of the film set as well as a featurette on the set construction, there’s also a documentary on those pesky rogue waves.