Friday
23Jan2009
Movie Review - 'Killshot'
Friday, January 23, 2009 at 1:02AM | Killshot
Starring Mickey Rourke, Diane Lane, Thomas Jane, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt  |
Fresh off a Golden Globe win and an Oscar nomination for his work in The Wrestler, there's another Mickey Rourke movie in theaters this weekend. Now, it wasn't planned this way originally. His "new" film, an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard novel called Killshot, was filmed years ago.
Killshot has been a troubled project all along, bouncing around for years in development before it wound up on the plate of director John Madden (Shakespeare in Love). The film went into production in October 2005, so when we thank Darren Aronofsky for reviving Rourke's career, John Madden certainly gave it a shot, too. Why the delayed release? Primarily because the film just isn't spectacular in any way. It has been sitting on a shelf for over two years now and the best chance to make money with it is by riding the coattails of The Wrestler.
It's tough, as an Elmore Leonard fan, to watch a movie that has so little Elmore left in it. If you're a young writer who struggles with making your dialogue come to life, read Leonard. Just about any of it. His plots are usually OK to pretty good, but they're also not too divergent. There's good guys, bad guys, money, women, and guns in most of his crime stories. Some are funnier than others, but what makes Leonard worth the read is the characters he creates and the way they interact on the page.
The film adaptations of Leonard's work have not been consistent. In one corner, there's Out of Sight, 3: 10 to Yuma, Jackie Brown, and Get Shorty, and in the other corner, you'll find Stick, Be Cool, and The Big Bounce. And the key in every case is the characters.
Killshot fails to the degree that it does because one character, Richie, a small-time crook played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is so manic and unbelievable that everything else around him is poisoned. Gordon-Levitt is as much to blame as anyone else for not seeing how artificial this criminal really is, especially when he's played against a man of few words like Blackbird, the Native American hitman portrayed by Rourke.
They make an odd team, and they're supposed to, but it's so far to go from Rourke to Gordon-Levitt that it's exhausting to watch scenes of them together. Blackbird, an experienced mob assassin is roped into a scheme by his new acquaintance, one that involves blackmailing a local realtor for wads of cash. But because Richie is so green, he doesn't take care to cover his tracks, so he and his partner are seen in the act by one of the realtor's employees (Diane Lane) and her estranged husband (Thomas Jane).
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