Film review of The Killer's Game (2024)

A number of wrestlers have attempted to make the jump from the ring to the big screen over the years, and I think my favorite of them is Dave Bautista, who has proven himself to be a truly fascinating screen personality over the past few years. Sure, he's scary and imposing enough to be convincing in pure action roles, but he goes beyond that – he's also shown a real flair for comedy, such as in the Guardians of the Galaxy films and Glass Onion, and when he's just had to flex his dramatic muscles, such as his brief appearance in Blade Runner 2049, he's shown a calm, down-to-earth quality reminiscent of the late, great character actor Robert Forster. Even when he's stuck in mediocre to terrible films like the My Spy films, his screen presence is enough to keep you watching. Although Bautista is still as captivating as ever in the sad action comedy “Killer's Game,” not even he can save this flop from quickly degenerating into 100 minutes of blood-soaked boredom.

He plays Joe Flood, a skilled assassin from Budapest. Don't worry, he's perhaps the most ethical character of this kind to appear on screen in a long time – he only takes on contracts to wipe out those who truly deserve it, he has a strict professional code that he will not violate under any circumstances, and the role of Zvi, his mentor/supervisor, has been filled by none other than Ben Kingsley, the man who once played Gandhi. The guy is so lucky that during the massacre at a dance performance that forms the opening sequence, he has a meet-cute with lead dancer Maize (Sofia Boutella), which blossoms into a romance that inspires him to want to quit the business for good now that he has what a much better assassin comedy would have described as “a newfound respect for life.”

Unfortunately, Joe is also suffering from debilitating headaches and his doctor reports that he has an incurable neurodegenerative disease and only has three months to live. Not wanting Maize to see him suffer, he comes up with the idea of ​​taking on a contract on himself, but when Zvi refuses to do so, he goes to another assassin, Marianna (Pom Klementieff), to hire someone to kill him. Since Marianna's father is one of many Joe has taken out over the years, she is perfectly content to hire people for the job. Unfortunately, just as the contract is about to go into effect—spoiler alert!—Joe's doctor calls and tells him there was a mix-up at the lab and he is perfectly fine. When Joe tries to cancel the contract, Marianna not only refuses, but brings a whole host of hitmen and mercenaries on board.

The concept of someone hiring a hitman to kill someone but then changing their mind and failing to quit the job has appeared in numerous films over the years – the late Graham Chapman made it into a quirky comedy called The Odd Job (1978) and it was central to the plot of Warren Beatty's great Bulworth. However, screenwriters Rand Ravich and James Coyne, adapting a novel by Jay R. Bonnansinga, failed to put any new twists on the material that might have made it more interesting. Once the basic premise is established, the film is little more than a series of scenes in which Joe confronts groups of increasingly colorful assassins—including a lesbian stripper duo, two Scottish brothers whose every utterance requires subtitles, and the world's seemingly deadliest K-pop group—and beats, shoots, stabs, and/or blows them up really well in scenes that contain so much blood that a John Wick movie seems downright Buddhist by comparison. That might have been acceptable if these battles had been presented with the kind of kinetic visual flair and energy of those films, but they're handled by director JJ Perry (whose previous film was the dull Jamie Foxx vampire hunter Day Shift) in a loud but listless manner that's further undone by the reams of woefully implausible CGI gore on display.

Even in these mostly dire circumstances, Bautista does his best with the hand (among other body parts flying around), and the extent to which the film works is almost entirely due to his efforts. I guess that while he must have realized that something like this was probably a step back 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 do his best, and as a result, it's more tolerable than it would 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're largely 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 disappointed to find that they're only on screen together for a few minutes at most.

Equal parts boring and derivative, The Killer's Game is a ready-made cinema product so utterly generic that the only truly surprising thing about it is that it's actually being released in theaters rather than straight to streaming, where it would be quickly swallowed up by the algorithm without anyone noticing or mourning it. That's a shame, because Bautista, even at this relatively early stage of his film career, clearly deserves better material than he's getting here. Hopefully, by the time he finally becomes a full-fledged movie star, most people will have forgotten the film even existed. Hell, most will probably have forgotten it existed by the end of this month.