VERDICT: An action-comedy that contains neither, this generic exercise will remain forgotten as Dave Bautista’s star continues to rise.
Alonso Duralde
September 13th, 2024
Dave Bautista has said that he wants to be considered an awards-worthy actor — a noble ambition, and an achievable one, based on his work in films like Knock at the Cabin and Blade Runner 2049. What’s not going to help him in that goal is starring in garbage movies like The Killer’s Game.
An action film with no thrills and a comedy bereft of laughs, The Killer’s Game plays like a tax shelter disguised as a movie, where everyone involved has done the minimal amount required to say, “No, really, this is a feature film.” Dumped unceremoniously into theaters in the post–Labor Day wasteland, it’s bound to be completely forgotten by Halloween.
Bautista stars as Joe Flood, Europe’s most prolific hitman, but he’s still the hero since his targets are exclusively criminals; as his handler Zvi (a slumming Ben Kingsley) points out more than once, Joe works clean, never taking out kids or witnesses or random bystanders. Still, the job is catching up with Joe, who suffers from headaches and double vision. He falls in love with dancer Maize (Sofia Boutella), but just as their relationship starts getting serious, Joe is informed by his doctor that he has a rare brain disease that will kill him within three months.
Not wanting Maize to be burdened with his physical deterioration, Joe tries to have himself killed professionally, and when Zvi turns down the gig, Joe turns to rival assassination-pimp Marianna (Bautista’s Guardians of the Galaxy co-star Pom Klementieff), who’s happy to take Joe’s $2 million, since she’s had a longstanding vendetta against him. Wouldn’t you know it, though, Joe’s doctor has misdiagnosed him, so now he’s going to have to fend off Marianna’s international squads of killers if he wants to live, retire, and spend the rest of his life with Maize?
There’s a germ of an idea in the script by Rand Ravich and James Coyne, adapting the novel by Jay R. Bonansinga; one imagines something akin to The Warriors, where Joe has to survive an onslaught of hired killers who have their respective thematic shticks. Unfortunately, the best The Killer’s Game can come up with is Terry Crews’ 1970s-blaxploitation-cosplaying assassin; the other hit men are fairly lazily portrayed, including “drunken, unintelligible Scottish brothers” (played by Scott Adkins and Drew Galloway), “sexy lesbian strippers” (Lucy Cork and Shauna West), “Spaniard who uses Flamenco as a martial art” (Marko Zaror), and “generic Korean club kid” (Lee Hoon).
The film has no idea how to map out a love story for Bautista and Botello, two talented performers who have very little chemistry together. Editor Simon Smith works overtime creating smoochy montages that do the heavy lifting of creating a relationship; this task, at least, must have provided some respite from his main job of chopping all of the action sequences into frantic chaos.
Bautista is the star (and executive producer) here, but the film never presents him in an actual flattering light: it’s as though director JJ Perry (Day Shift) told cinematographer Flavio Martínez Labiano (Jungle Cruise), “Joe is a hired killer; he works in the shadows,” and then the DP took him literally, casting shade upon the protagonist in every shot.
The Killer’s Game gets credit for letting Budapest be Budapest, rather than trying to pass it off as a featureless European metropolis, but that’s about the only way in which the movie avoids the generic. When the day comes that Bautista does win that award, he’s not going to mention this movie in his acceptance speech.
