Wild Target (2010)

Wild Target, a 2010 black comedy from director Jonathan Lynn, is a remake of the 1993 French film of the same name. It concerns a meticulous hitman, his domineering mother, a con artist, and a hapless young apprentice. The plot involves a swindled billionaire, a rival assassin, and a series of farcical escapes. From the perspective of contemporary social consciousness, the film is a sparse specimen. The cast is uniformly white British, a fact that might prompt a sigh in certain quarters, but the film itself offers no comment on representation. It simply presents its players and gets on with the business of screwball violence.

The few markers of progressive sensibility are faint and quickly extinguished. A single comedic beat has the hitman briefly wondering if he is attracted to his male apprentice, but the notion is dismissed as a gag and carries no further weight. The female characters are capable and sharp, yet they operate within stock farce archetypes, not as vehicles for an articulated feminist statement. The villain is a wealthy gangster, and he is swindled, but the film treats this as plotting rather than a critique of capital. There is no engagement with race, climate, body positivity, neurodivergence, or historical revisionism. The film has no interest in such matters.

The result is a lightweight entertainment that never pauses to deliver a lesson. Its lecture energy is negligible. It wants to amuse, and it succeeds only intermittently, according to the reviews of the time. For those who track such things, this is a film that predates the current era of moral instruction in cinema. It is a curious artifact, a reminder that not every comedy needs to carry a message. It simply exists, a modest farce with a talented cast, content to be nothing more than that.