The Killer's Game (2024)

The Killer's Game arrives as a hitman comedy of the old school, which is to say it concerns a professional killer who takes out a contract on himself after a misdiagnosis and then must survive the resulting bidding war. J.J. Perry directs with efficiency and no apparent interest in saying anything about anything. Dave Bautista plays Joe Flood with a hangdog sincerity the material does not deserve, and the film's one genuine pleasure is watching a man built like a loading dock attempt courtship. The ensemble is notably international: Sofia Boutella, Terry Crews, Pom Klementieff, Ben Kingsley, Scott Adkins, assorted Europeans on motorcycles. This is casting as logistical convenience for a story that hops around Budapest, not a statement of any kind. The hitmen come from everywhere because the plot requires a variety of accents to kill in sequence.

Where the film brushes against contemporary sensibilities, it does so lightly and without conviction. Maize begins as a dancer in peril and ends as a woman who shoots a man in the head, though the script frames this as tragedy and then hands her a pregnancy and a wedding ring, restoring the traditional order with a shrug. The two stripper assassins billed as partners hover near a same-sex pairing without ever confirming it, a coyness that reads as timidity. Casting the burly Bautista as a romantic lead is a mild and welcome departure from leading-man norms, and critics seized on it as the film's sole act of imagination.

The picture has no interest in race, climate, capital, or the human mind's varied weather. Money motivates the plot, but contract killing here is furniture, not critique. Nobody lectures. Nobody learns. The film ends with a wife suggesting her husband keep murdering for the money, which is either a joke or an admission that the whole enterprise has nothing on its mind at all.