When
you think about it, hitmen are really serial killers who get paid for it.
Nevertheless, the movie business likes to romanticize them. This is shaping up
to be a bumper year for hitmen comedies. If you want to watch something smart
and challenging, check out Kills on Wheels. If you’re in the mood for something dumb but funny, the surprise
hit Hitman’s Bodyguard is probably
still around. It looks like collaboration between Preston Sturges and Noel
Coward compared to Taran Killam’s dumb but excruciatingly unfunny Killing Gunther (trailer here), which opens today in New York.
Blake
is a whiny, self-absorbed hitman, who is determined to leap-frog to the top of
his industry by taking out the long-reigning top dog, Robert Bendik, a.k.a.
Gunther. To do so, he recruits a team of top professionals, including Donnie
the demolitions expert, Sanaa the femme fatale sniper, a pair of creepy Russian
siblings, and Yong, a useless poisoner. They try to set up Gunther with a phony
contract, but he still has the drop on them. Inevitably, the hunters become the
hunted. We will see the tables turn mockumentary-style, thanks to the
documentary crews the two rival hitmen have convinced at gunpoint to capture
their shenanigans.
Right
now, you’re probably wondering who is Taran Killam? In the short run, the
answer is one of those blandly disposable former SNL cast-members. Judging from this film, the long-term answer is
he’s nobody. As Blake, Killam is just an offensively boring man-child. If he
gave you the choice of documenting his every move on camera or a bullet to the
head, you would probably say: “double tap me now.” However, if you want
unrepentant shtick than brother, does Arnold Schwarzenegger ever deliver. It is
down-right depressing watching his gas-bag gags involving country & western
crooning and lederhosen.
As
Sanaa, Hannah Simone is about the only cast-member who shows any dignity and
screen presence during the film. Yet, Killam cannot resist undercutting her
with awkward jokes involving her fanatically over-protective Iranian father
Rahmat. Cobie Smulders doesn’t get much chance to exercise her comedy chops as
Lisa McCalla, the ex-girlfriend of both Blake and Gunther, but that also means
she gets through the movie relatively unscathed (watch her work in the weirdly
underappreciated Slammin’ Salmon
instead).
