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.