Killers

Director: Robert Luketic
Cast: Katherine Heigl, Ashton Kutcher, Catherine O’Hara and Tom Selleck
Releasing in cinemas: 29 July 2010
Rated: M

What might have been a good gig with a young handsome secret agent becoming attached to a ditzy arm-candy blonde on holidays with her family in the French Riviera, gets off with a bang then stumbles around for the next 90 minutes. It ends up in a suburbia filled with characters from the Addams family trying to knock off the hero for a bounty of $2 million.

There’s a couple of enthusiastic and inventive car chases, lots of wild shooting and some karate kicks, but it never grabs the viewer like it should. Amid the action there’s a scattering of funny moments, but they’re rather forced.

After a break-up with an old boyfriend Jen Kornfeldt (Katherine Heigl) hardly wants to be involved with men again. She rather reluctantly joins her parents on a holiday trip to France, and before you can say ‘bonjour’ she spots handsome hunk Spencer Aimes (Ashton Kutcher). Spencer a kind of super agent who surreptitiously dispatches some dodgy jokers by blowing up their chopper. Later Jen and Spencer meet and romance flourishes like mushrooms after rain.

Three years down the track she and Spencer are just married and living in American suburbia with typically nosy neighbours. Not perhaps the brightest globe in the box, Jen’s blissfully unaware of her new husband’s previous secret agent life.

Her father (Tom Selleck) is a tight lipped old warhorse who has little fondness for his son-in-law, and the reason later becomes apparent. Mum (Catherine O’Hara) is a dipsomaniac; while Jen spends much time preening her curves in tight tops.

But not for long. Madness invades their world as a huge bounty is put on Spencer in reprisal for not continuing in the spy business. Dodging killers in every cupboard, bullets at every turn, life becomes less than easy for the newlyweds. Friends and neighbours - even family - aren’t to be trusted anymore as Jen’s world turns to chaos.

Ashton Kutcher (The Butterfly Effect) is like a teenage James Bond with an unruly fringe (reminding of Christopher Reeves as Superman) and he gets through the action bits well enough, although without stretching the thespian chords. Tipping the scales of wide-eyed dumbness, Katherine Heigl (Knocked Up) seems intent on channeling that other dippy blonde Anna Faris in The House Bunny. Admittedly the action’s played for farce but the characters are purely synthetic.

Director Robert Luketic, a Sydney boy, with such box office hits on his resume as Legally Blonde and Monster-In-Law, must be sitting this dance party out. There’s not a great flourish after the first reel - a pity as he’s capable of better. Part of the problem is the writing by Bob DeRosa and Ted Griffin which pales by comparison with Knight & Day which has a similar plot line. That movie plays out so well thanks to the vibrant Cameron Diaz and the sparkling tricky script.

The attractively photographed tourist scenes in Ville Franche have a suspicion of payola about them, though they do brighten up act one. Killers offers few amusing sequences and only modest thrills; it fails to deliver on its initial promise.

John Bale