FILM REVIEW: KILLERS

Roadshow Distribution
Now Showing

It seems you can't make a rom-com any more unless there are guns, car chases and the threat that someone's heart may burst, literally. Following on from The Bounty Hunter and Knight and Day, Killers also has its romantic protagonists – Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher – in all sorts of mortal danger but unlike the former, there's actually some fun to be had, and, unlike the latter, there's a believable sexual attraction between the two.

Jen (Heigl) and Spence (Kutcher) meet cute in Nice, France where she is vacationing with her parents (Tom Selleck and Catherine O'Hara) and he's working ie killing bad guys for the C.I.A. But Spence wants out of the professional killing game and believes he can have a normal life with Jen.

Cut to three years later and the pair are happily ensconced in suburbia, not far from her parents' house. Spence works in construction but its when he gets a package from his former boss requesting a meet and one final mission that his old life comes back to bite him in the ass.

Suddenly weird but hitherto uncomplicated friends and neighbours are packing weapons and trying to bring Spence in: he has a bounty for $20 million on his head. It's a rude awakening for Jen who has been blissfully unaware of her husband's past but her shock and terror has the edge taken off somewhat by an equally scary prospect – motherhood.

Robert Luketic, the Aussie director who hit it big with Legally Blonde but has made middling fare – Monster-In-Law, The Ugly Truth – since, kicks the film up a gear when the guns start going off but the rom and the com are still fairly thin on the ground. Kutcher and Heigl make for a photogenic couple (Kutcher certainly hit the gym hard for this role) but once the action starts Heigl's Jen becomes a shrill shrieker and you begin praying - against hope, because you know it won't happen – that she may take a bullet.

There's no denying Killers is fun, of sorts, but there's not a lot to it and it ends rather abruptly in an unlikely happy families scenario (the revelation of a key character's day job is as plain as the moustache on his face), where everything can be hugged out in truth circle, whatever the hell that is.