  Katherine Heigl stars with Ashton Kutcher in Killers. |
Other than being an utterly miscast, ill-advised combo of rom-com and spy thriller distinguished by lousy writing and featuring two people with no screen chemistry, Killers is perfectly mediocre.
The mix of comedy and action provides neither laughs nor thrills, which is probably not the outcome the filmmakers were going for. Katherine Heigl stars in Killers as Jen, a woman who has just been dumped by her boyfriend. She’s going with her parents (Catherine O’Hara, brilliant as always, and Tom Selleck) on a holiday to Nice, and there, without much ado, she meets the man of her dreams.
Spencer (Ashton Kutcher) is a hired killer, but Jen doesn’t know about that part of his life. As soon as Spencer meets Jen and falls in love with her, he hangs up his old assassin life forever. Or so he thinks.
Three years go by. Back in America, Jen and Spencer are married and living in the suburbs. Spencer even has some sort of construction job. It takes about 45 minutes of nothing happening before Spencer is contacted by his old assassin boss. Turns out there’s a $20 million bounty on Spencer’s head, and just about anybody in the neighbourhood could be the villain. This news makes Spencer somewhat withdrawn. And so, while he peers out the window looking for bad guys, Jen worries and pouts, thinking he’s withdrawing from her. She frets that there’s something wrong with the marriage. That’s somebody’s idea of domestic humour.
One minute Killers is merely daffy, and the next it’s just dreadful. Spencer has to admit how many people he’s killed, and Jen makes a little joke about sexual partners and exaggeration. It’s so disjointed it’s just bloody awful.
By the time the movie pairs up car chases and death with whining about a pregnancy test in a pharmacy (with an Usher cameo), you won’t know whether to laugh in disbelief or cry with frustration.
Catherine O’Hara and Tom Selleck, as Jen’s parents, don’t have enough to do. There’s a running sight gag that has O’Hara downing massive amounts of alcohol, day and night, and Selleck is adorable as a taciturn character, but they mostly just stroll through the story until they’re needed. Actually, they often seem to be in an entirely different movie. You’ll wish you were, too.
The real question about Killers is how it and The Ugly Truth — two major dogs — can have been directed by the same filmmaker who directed the fabulously frothy Legally Blonde. Did something weird happen to Robert Luketic’s sense of humour?
(This film is rated PG)
liz.braun@sunmedia.ca
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