Assassin Club

         The one thing you can count on in movies is that when something is working, you keep milking it until it doesn’t anymore. Then you keep going a bit longer. With the success of the John Wick franchise, we now have plenty of films about hired killers who just have to do what they do best to survive, like survive an onslaught nameless bud guys. When it comes to those offerings, the final product has been everywhere from really good to the very forgettable. Now we have a new member of the club so the question is where does Assassin Club fall in that grading scale?

          Morgan (Henty Golding) is a hired killer, whose handler Caldwell (Sam Neill) has sent him on a job to kill a bad man. Although everything seems to be going well, when Morgan is about to pull the trigger, he is shot at by another assassin who has Morgan in his sights. With some good use of red smoke, Morgan is able to escape and even takes out more than a few henchmen along the way. Of course Morgan wants to know who just tried to kill him and after some prodding, he gets Caldwell to spill the beans on what is going on.  It seems someone with some money wants to play a game, and hires six killers and set contracts on all of them for each other. If one kills another, he is to remove a finger, send it to an address and be rewarded with one million dollars. The game is on, and Morgan is good at his job, but he has some competition, someone named Falk (Noomi Rapace), who suggests she and Morgan work together. Things though in the assassin club is always every man or woman for themselves and this game can only have one winner, the question is who will that be?

Written by Thomas Dunn,  Assassin Club is a movie that wants to build a web, that more often than not winds up getting tangled in it. The narrative shortcuts that are used for connivence, ultimately undermines every element that makes the premise of the film sound exciting. The script though is not the only thing holding this film back. Morgan is a bad assassin. For a professional he often makes amateur mistakes as well like not finishing off his targets, something that comes back to bite him more than once. Dunn and director Camille Delamarre seem more focused on the coolness of the premise, and just let all the other chips fall where they lay. And you’re left with a film that looks like chips falling.

                I wanted to enjoy Assassin Club, I mean it’s got a great cast and a concept ripe with potential. Instead it’s just a drag, and frustrating as it never delivers what it should and never satisfies the audience.  I will say that Delamarre does make the film look good and we do get some nice locations as we get the usual globe hoping you expect from a film like this. That unfortunately that is not nearly enough to bring any kind of enjoyment, even on a visceral action level. Much like the title, the club in question only sounds cool.