It’s only a definite article short of being a film noir, but Killers is an enjoyable lightweight comedy about a woman who falls in love with an assassin.
Katherine Heigl, who has a bit more individuality than many of the standard-issue Hollywood blondes she resembles, plays Jen Kornfeldt: she is going on holiday to Nice with her lush of a mother (Catherine O’Hara) and her twitchy patriarch of a father (Tom Selleck). She has recently split up with her latest boyfriend, as her mother keeps reminding her, so she’s lucky to bump into a shirtless Ashton Kutcher within minutes of arriving at their posh hotel.
Kutcher is Spencer, whom we have already met, albeit briefly, in the credits prologue; there he was busy with some Bondy derring-do in a red sports car. He seems rather young to be doing such dirty work, but it all happens under the sign of the CIA, as presented in the computer visuals right at the start, so it must be okay. Perhaps he started training at kindergarten. Not that the movie takes any of this killer-spy-Bondery seriously for a minute, and the CIA is never mentioned again — there’s just a shadowy but also somehow entirely ordinary presence, controlling assassins and so forth, that hovers over the story like a string-pulling god.
Before you can say “montage sequence”, Jen and Spencer are in love, are married, are ensconced in a lovely house in a twee suburb of Middle America, and it’s three months later. Spencer has a proper job, something to do with construction, and appears to be doing very well. He has managed to leave his previous employment behind — and to keep it a secret from Jen. Mrs Kornfeldt is still a lush and Mr Kornfeldt is still twitchy, but all seems well.
Then all hell breaks loose. People are after Spencer; some awful link to his previous life remains and has come back to haunt him. You might say the honeymoon is over.
A few of the synopses I’ve read, even the one-line publicity descriptions, give away too much, and maybe I have already. The summary above could be the plot of a frowningly serious thriller, with added marital sentiment, and you can practically see Charlize Theron as the anguished wife discovering that her hubby used to be a paid killer. You can cast any Hollywood A-list male star opposite her and I’m sure it would work. It would probably even make money.
But Killers is not in the business of serious. It’s got a bit of Mr and Mrs Smith in its DNA, some of the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle True Lies, dashes of Grosse Pointe Blank and The Whole Nine Yards — and of course it contains memories of all those movies with duplicitous husbands in them, going back to Gaslight, to Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion and even his Rebecca. Come to think of it, with a little more dark humour, better dialogue and a cast with a bit of gravitas, Hitchcock could have made a great Hitchcock out of Killers.
As it is, Killers is determinedly a comedy. A lot of people ultimately get killed, but all those deaths don’t amount to a hill of beans in the crazy world of Jen and Spencer’s love story. It’s like the traditional romance in which obstacles fall in the path of true love and have to be removed before love can blossom — except here the obstacle is death. Not that death exists in Killers as anything but a comic pratfall.
The movie’s dialogue is not as sophisticated or witty as one might wish, being mostly the usual sitcom-style humour based on misunderstanding or heavily applied dramatic irony, but it serves. The situations are often amusing, Kutcher is nice to look at, and Heigl supplies her role with the right amount of oomph. O’Hara, as the mother, is very good; no sign that the drinking is really a problem, either.
It’s all completely absurd, with nary an echo of the real world; it’s a self-enclosed Hollywood fantasy made out of bits of other Hollywood fantasies. But Killers is better than the last few such confections I’ve seen, and would probably make a good date movie if you want something undemanding but not utterly stoopid. It also comes in promptly at 90 minutes, so you can get on to the next phase of the evening without delay.