DVD--Killers

or: Katherine Heigl in another rom-com.

One word to sum it up: Laughable.

When will Katherine Heigl stop? She is quickly becoming the next Jennifer Aniston. I never watched Grey's Anatomy, but if she was turning down Emmy awards for it then she must have been good. And she left that show to star in all these rom-coms, where she plays pretty much the same character. No, honey, it's not good for your career. The critical flop of Killers should have been enough evidence to back that up. Because the only thing worse than reteaming Katherine Heigl and her The Ugly Truth director Robert Luketic is adding Ashton Kutcher to the mix.

Spencer Aimes (Ashton Kutcher) is just your average, undercover, government-hired super-assassin accustomed to a life of exotic European locales, flashy sports cars and even flashier women. But when he meets Jen Kornfeldt (Katherine Heigl), a beautiful, fun-loving computer tech recovering from a bad break-up, he finds true love...and happily trades international intrigue for domestic bliss. Three years later, Spencer and Jen are still enjoying a picture-perfect marriage - that is, until the morning after Spencer's 30th birthday. That's when Spencer and Jen learn he's the target of a multi-million dollar hit. Even worse, the hired killers have been stalking the happy couple for years, and could be anyone: friends, neighbors, the grocery store clerk, even that crabby old guy shuffling across the street. Now Spencer and Jen are on the run for their lives. As their suburban paradise turns into a paranoid game of dodge-the-bullet, they must find out who wants Spencer dead and why, all the while trying to save their marriage, manage his in-laws, keep up neighborly appearances...and just plain survive.

This movie is oddly fun...that is after you dig three feet deep under the boringness of it all to find it. It takes aaaaaages to find out where it's going and actually start. When it does get going, it unfortunately succumbs to badly put together action sequences and lacklustre dialogue. Weaving a pregnancy scare into all of this is not only a cheesy but a rather sad way to try and get the audience to feel for the particularly unlikeable and wooden characters. Killers tries so hard to be every genre it can be: light comedy, romance, action, thriller, drama...but it fails in it's execution. The whole thing is bogged down by a particularly unfunny and boring script and actors who can't be bothered trying to lift the material.

Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher have no chemistry, which really lets this film down. I think that comes from the fact that Kutcher just didn't feel like acting in this, and instead put on his 'best' assassin impression and went a long for the ride. Catherine O'Hara has a disturbing character--some sort of wild alcoholic--which was bordering on being like the stoned mother out of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Tom Selleck, is probably the best of them all, because he is the only one who appears to be taking this film seriously. To be perfectly honest, this movie is kinda fun, and it was a lot better than I thought it would be. But really, Killers is dull and everything a movie shouldn't be: unlikeable, resorting to strange ways to grab your attention, and laughably stupid.


THE VERDICT: Extremely light material, which is snowed under by layers of dullness, thanks to a chemistry-less relationship between Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl.

4/10