THE KILLER'S GAME Review: The Ghost of the Action Movies Past

Tuxedo-clad superstar hitman Joe Flood (Dave Bautista) crashes a premiere of contemporary ballet in the Budapest opera house in order to kill his target. As panic ensues, Joe ends up escorting one of the dancers, Maize (Sofia Boutella) out and accidentally keeping her phone. He returns it, gets a dinner invite - and then a girlfriend out of it. All the while, Joe has typical problems just like any regular joe: his job keeps him extremely busy (meaning that he jets all over Europe offing bad dudes) and he might possibly be a bit burnt out as he starts experiencing some headaches and double vision.

A full medical checkup reveals he has a brain condition that will kill him within three months. When a Google search confirms the doctor’s conclusion, Joe decides he wants to go down in a blaze of glory. He tries to put a hit on himself with his handler Zwi (Ben Kingsley) but the man loves him too much to agree. Joe then approaches the rival organization headed by Antoinette (Pom Klementieff) who conveniently hates him for killing her father, and sets up a contract with her. As Joe’s colleagues prepare to send him into oblivion, he gets the news that he was misdiagnosed and isn’t dying – at least not from an uncurable disease. Guns, grenades, katanas and axes are still very much on the table.

As Chandler Bing would say – the time machine works! While watching J.J. Perry’s The Killer’s Game it’s hard to shake the feeling that this film coming out in theaters in 2024 could (and probably should) have been released ten, twenty or even thirty years ago. With some minor tweaks you can see it as a 90s release and a something that Jean-Claude Van Damme could star in. In the 2010s, The Killer’s Game would absolutely have Jason Statham as Joe and be directed by Joe Carnahan or D.J. Caruso. The feeling that this material is largely a product of a different era corresponds with the film’s history and its long struggle to be produced. Jay Bonansinga’s novel it is based on, is indeed from the 90s, as is the first version of the script that was later repeatedly reworked when the film got stuck in development limbo between different studios and possible directors (Caruso and Statham were actually both attached to the project at one point). As a result, J.J. Perry’s version is a ghost of the film that might have been. Some might think it adorably old-fashioned, but unfortunately, it passes this specific station somewhere between killer strippers and a dancing afficionado hitman, and ventures straight for outdated.

The idea of an action comedy mixed with a romcom with a lot of gore and Dave Bautista as a romantic lead is honestly amazing, but neither the screenwriters nor the director seem to know how to blend it all together organically and make it truly fun. Both the tone and the pacing appear off. It takes The Killer’s Game almost an hour to set up the main plot, and the dark quirky humor and nihilistic undertones set by severed limbs, a DoorDash kind of app for contracted kills and a few pages straight out of Tarantino’s book, don't really correspond with an outright melodrama of Joe and Maize’s storyline and the dialogue Bautista and Boutella are blessed with.

It's the second directorial outing by J.J. Petty, a martial artist, stunt coordinator and fight choreographer who worked on the John Wick films among others, and it’s clear where his heart still is. The fighting scenes are executed with a sense of creativity, but even they fizzle out quickly once you realize they are all kind of similar to one another, and the stakes aren’t really all that high since most of Joe’s opponents are conveniently incompetent. Seriously, Dave Bautista literally dismembering some K-pop band lookalikes is not as exciting as it may sound. The space between the fights is filled with episodes of people sitting down for coffee or dinner, one memorable episode of Bautista doing some hardcore googling, and multiple musical sequences introducing different hitmen from all over Europe. Speaking of: Budapest that has previously doubled on screen as everything from Paris to Buenos Aires, gets to be the main setting with lots of exposition shots – only to end up looking like any random European location.

Bautista tries to carry the load of the crumbling script on his broad shoulders and overshadow tonal shifts with his huge charisma, and it almost works in the parts where he’s playing the socially awkward love-struck guy. Sofia Boutella lights up the screen every time she is on it, but the many rewrites seemingly turned her character in such a frenzy mix of a damsel in distress and a manic pixie dream girl, it just gets uncomfortable to watch. Ben Kingsley is on auto pilot but still delivers the best joke of the movie, quoting Dolly Parton. And in a great moment of what looks like self-awareness, the film makes Dylan Moran randomly appear from nowhere and just look around at everyone with his trademark smirk of condescending derision for straight five minutes.