A number of wrestlers over the years have attempted to make the shift from the ring to the big screen, and, of them, I think that my favorite may well be Dave Bautista, who has shown himself to be a genuinely intriguing screen personality over the last few years. Sure, he is fearsome and imposing enough to be convincing in pure action roles but it goes beyond that—he has shown a real flair for comedy as well in things like the “Guardians of the Galaxy” films and “Glass Onion,” and, on the occasions when he has been asked to flex only his dramatic muscles, as in his brief turn in “Blade Runner 2049,” he has demonstrated a quietly down-to-earth quality reminiscent of the late, great character actor Robert Forster. Even when he is stuck in mediocre-to-awful films like the “My Spy” films, his screen presence is enough to keep you watching. While Bautista is still as engaging as ever in the woeful action-comedy “Killer’s Game,” not even he can save this dud from quickly devolving into 100 minutes of blood-drenched tedium.
He plays Joe Flood, a veteran hired killer based out of Budapest. Don’t worry, for he is the perhaps the most ethical such character to hit the screen in many a moon—he only accepts assignments to eradicate those who truly deserve it, he has a strict code of ethics towards his profession that he will not cross under any circumstances, and the role of Zvi, his mentor/handler, has been filled by no less a figure than Ben Kingsley, the man who once played Gandhi. The guy is so blessed that during the slaughter at a dance recital that makes up the opening sequence, he manages to have a meet cute with lead dancer Maize (Sofia Boutella) that blossoms into a romance that inspires him to want to get out of the game for good, now that he has what a much better hitman comedy would have described as “a newfound respect for life.”
Alas, Joe has also been suffering from debilitating headaches, and his doctor reports that he has been stricken with an incurable neurodegenerative disease and gives him only three months to live. Not wanting Maize to see him suffer, he hits upon the idea of taking out a contract on himself, but when Zvi refuses to handle it, he goes to another assassin handler, Marianna (Pom Klementieff), to hire someone to do him in. Since Marianna’s father is one of the many that Joe has taken out over the years, she is perfectly happy to bring people in for the job. Unfortunately, at precisely the moment that the contract takes effect—Spoiler Alert!—Joe’s doctor calls to let him know that there was a mix-up at the lab and that he is perfectly healthy. When Joe tries to call off the contract, Marianna not only refuses but brings in a whole array of killers and mercenaries.
The concept of someone hiring a hit man to kill somebody, having a sudden change of heart and then being unable to get the contract cancelled, is one that has turned up in a number of films over the years—the late Graham Chapman spun it out into a quirky comedy entitled “The Odd Job” (1978) and it was a key component of the plot of Warren Beatty’s great “Bulworth.” However, screenwriters Rand Ravich and James Coyne, adapting a novel by Jay R. Bonnansinga, have failed to come up with any kind of fresh spin on the material that might have made it more interesting. Once the basic premise is set up, the film becomes little more than a string of scenes in which Joe is confronted by groups of increasingly colorful hired killers—including a lesbian stripper duo, a pair of Scottish brothers whose every utterance require subtitles and what appears to be the world’s deadliest K-pop group—and beats, shoots, stabs and/or blows them up real good in scenes containing enough carnage to make a John Wick film seem practically Buddhist by comparison. This might have been acceptable if these battles were presented with the kind of kinetic visual flair and energy of those films, but they are handled by director J.J. Perry (whose previous film was the Jamie Foxx vampire hunter bore “Day Shift”) in a noisy-but-listless manner that is further undone by the vast amounts of woefully unconvincing CGI gore on display.
Even in these mostly dire circumstances, Bautista does the best he can with the hand (among other body parts flying around) on display and whatever degree that the film does work is due almost entirely to his efforts. My guess is that even though he must have realized doing something like this was probably a step backwards after appearing in more ambitious projects like the various MCU films, the two “Dune” movies, and even “Knock at the Cabin,” he was still determined to give it his all and as a result, it is more tolerable than it might have been in other hands. As for the rest of the cast, there are a number of strong personalities among them (including Terry Crews as one of the hired killers) but they are mostly wasted—the fiery Boutella is reduced to playing the concerned girlfriend, Kingsley is clearly just going through the motions and anyone expecting big things from the reunion of Bautista and his MCU co-star Klementieff will be bummed to discover that they only share maybe a couple of minutes of screen time together tops.
Dull and derivative in equal measure, “The Killer’s Game” is a piece of prefab cinematic product so utterly generic that the only truly surprising thing about it is that it is actually getting a theatrical release instead of going directly to streaming, where it would be swallowed up in the algorithm quickly and without anyone noticing or mourning its loss. This is a shame because Bautista, even at this relatively early stage in his screen career, clearly deserves better material than he has been granted here. Hopefully by the time that he finally becomes a full-fledged movie star of note, most everyone will have forgotten that it even existed. Hell, most everyone will probably forget that it existed by the end of this month.
