Posted in: Kaitlyn Booth, Lionsgate, Movies | Tagged: the killer's game

The Killer's Game Review: A Game Of Missed Opportunities

The Killer's Game had some serious potential, but it's a waste of a good idea, a good cast, and ultimately, a waste of everyone's time.

The Killer's Game has all of the right pieces to be an excellent film, including a great concept and cast, but it fumbles everything in the end and is just boring and unfunny in the end.

Director: J.J. Perry
Summary: A veteran assassin is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness and authorizes a kill on himself. After ordering the kill, an army of former colleagues pounce, and a new piece of information comes to light. Insanity ensues.

The Killer's Game Misses The Mark

Sometimes, a film has all of the right pieces in hand but just doesn't know how to put them together to make a coherent final film, and that is somehow worse than something that appeared to be doomed from the start. That's the fate of The Killer's Game because everything is there for this film to be good. The concept is a neat one; a hitman thinks he has a terminal illness so he puts a hit out on himself. A person with a grudge takes advantage of this, and when it turns out that he's not going to die and can't call off the hit, he's attacked by everyone in the industry who is looking for a quick payday. That setup has so much potential for exciting and interesting action scenes because there are so many different types of assassins.

However, despite having a large cast of characters that are all looking to put a bullet in Dave Bautista's Joe, there is only one fight that is really unique, while the rest of them are all very by the numbers. The film does this whole thing where they introduce each new assassin with a little montage of them completing a job so we can see their skills. The problem is that little montage is the only time we really see those fun skills playing out. By the time everyone makes it to their respective standoff with Joe, everyone is throwing punches and shooting guns. There are brief moments when the film decides that it wants to up the comedy part of its "action comedy" label and do something ridiculous, but they are few and far between. We've seen all of this before, and the little pre-show lineup montages should have been teasers for more insanity in the actual action scenes. Instead, they were significantly better than anything we saw when they all went up against Joe.

The Killer's Game also tries to be funny, but it's a comedy that's written by someone who heard about jokes from someone else one time and then was hired to write jokes. Nothing lands the way it's supposed to, and we know that Bautista has comedic timing when he has good writing.  Comedic timing and delivery with excellent writing is how we got Drax the Destroyer, so it's not his fault. It's not anyone's fault because everyone is trying, but everyone is too subdued for how buckwild this premise is. Everyone and everything should have been cranked up to eleven, and this film should have been ridiculous. Instead, it felt like it was trying to be realistic with its silly premise, which is a disservice to the premise itself.

The way The Killer's Game treats its female characters is even worse than the long line of men that die in this film. Pom Klementieff is our main bad guy, but she never really leaves her office, and we only have one brief scene where we see her being a badass in her — you guessed it — promo video introduction. Sofia Boutella does not fare much better as the love interest Maize. They could have done something really interesting with her because she's a dancer, arguably one of the most physically, mentally, and emotionally challenging jobs you can take on. Dancers have to keep their bodies in perfect form, count calories, and have grueling schedules. We see some of that at the beginning of the film, and Maize speaks about how she is probably going to retire soon, but she isn't retired yet, and her being a dancer never comes up beyond their first date. They don't use her skills as a dancer in any interesting ways to get her out of a dangerous situation or anything like that. If she isn't swooning, she's been kidnapped, and then the film ends with the biggest cliche reveal for a female character ever. There are also a couple of female assassins, but none of them get to do anything interesting.

The men don't make out much better if we're being honest. How they managed to portray Bautista with this little charisma on screen is sort of amazing, but no one else fares any better. Terry Crews does his best to inject a little life into the proceedings, but he's doing exactly what you would expect from him in terms of performance and nothing else. With this many actors running around, you would think that someone would have fun, but everyone appears to be running on autopilot at best or half asleep at worst.

The Killer's Game had some serious potential.  All of the pieces could have come together if the film was either a campy, over-the-top mess or played completely straight with excellent action scenes that make good use of its extensive cast. However, it is trying to be a little of both and is mediocre everywhere because of it. It's a waste of a good idea, a good cast, and ultimately, a waste of everyone's time.

The Killer's Game

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Review by Kaitlyn Booth

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2/10

The Killer's Game has all of the right pieces to be an excellent film, including a great concept and cast, but it fumbles everything in the end and is just boring and unfunny in the end.

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