THE GUNMAN
Open Road Films
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten for Shockya. Databased on Rotten Tomatoes.
Grade: C+
Director: Pierre Morel
Screenwriter: Don MacPherson, Pete Travis, Sean Penn. Novel by Jean-Patrick Manchette
Cast: Sean Penn, Idris Elba, Ray Winstone, Mark Rylance, Jasmine Trinca, Peter Franzén, Javier Bardem
Screened at: Review 2, NYC, 3/5/15
Opens: March 20, 2015
If you choose to be a hit-man, you’re are selecting a risky profession. Not only can you be killed by the folks you’re gunning for. You’re even more likely to be done in by the very people who pay you for the simple reason that after the deed in done, who needs the only eyewitness to the murder to hang around, perhaps later to testify against these employers? Possible example: After Lee Harvey Oswald killed President Kennedy, there was instant talk that Oswald was just the fall guy, a minor player in a vast conspiracy. If this were true, wouldn’t his keeper want to get rid of him? Remember what happened to him a day after the killing. Oswald is arrested and shot dead by Jack Ruby, who later died from cancer. Who was Jack Ruby and why would he feel so incensed a day after the assassination? Hmmm.
A similar event motivates the action in Pierre Morel’s “The Gunman.” Morel, a camera operator in “Transporter” and “Transporter 2,” breaks through into the director’s chair in this adaptation of Jean-Patrick Manchette’s popular novel, which has been translated into English and is considered a classic crime story. Manchette’s said to be hearing the beat of a different drummer than most other writers of crime fiction.
If that’s true, not much of an idiosyncratic nature comes across in the film version despite Sean Penn’s attempts to create excitement as the man who shoots the government official in charge of the mines in the “Democratic” Republic of the Congo. Some attempt is made by director Morel in the opening segments to show the savagery at work in the now ten-years’ civil war with considerable mining wealth at stake in an otherwise desperately poor and hapless nation. Posing as a worker with a humanitarian outfit, Martin Terrier (Sean Penn) doubles as a hired killer who spends his spare time in the local dive with co-workers and a lovely girlfriend, Annie (Jasmine Trinca). In one of the movie’s centerpieces of tension, Terrier sets up an elaborate piece of equipment in a building chosen to hide him while he works to put the mining official in the telescopic lens.
Hearing that people want him dead (we find out later who and why, but suffice it to say that he knows too much and could release information that would bring down some high-up corporate execs), he flees to London and Barcelona. Years later he discovers his girlfriend married to a former co-worker, Felix (Javier Barden).
Of course the bad guys who hired him find out the location and what follows for the remaining third of the film is your standard chase-and-combat scene, with some classy photography of Barcelona and a final showdown in Barcelona’s bull ring. (I’m happy to say that the government of Catalonia of which Barcelona is principal city outlawed that dreadful “sport” of bullfighting in 2011 not only as an animal rights issue but also to separate itself from the rest of Spain and perhaps to seek secession.)
The photography is splendid but the usual frantic fight editing is standard stuff, Sean Penn at 54 is too long in tooth for this kind of action, and his g.f. at 33 is way too young for his character. Javier Bardem is an embarrassment as a drunk and Jasmine Trinca’s Annie is half-asleep, obviously drugged, and of little interest in climactic scenes.
Now if the bull were shown to gore and kill the matador, who appears now and then to face a tormented animal already heavily weakened by picadors, you might have a better movie.
Unrated. 115 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – C
Acting – C+
Technical – C+
Overall – C+
