Assassin Club (15) |Close-Up Film Review

Not a club you would want to be a member of. 

Henry Golding stars as professional assassin Morgan with Sam Neill sporting a perfect British accent as his suave controller and boss Caldwell.   Caldwell has a lucrative new contract for his protege – to assassinate seven equally skilled assassins around the world.  The snag is though, as Morgan quickly discovers, that the assassins have also been hired to kill him.  

It’s a promising premise for an action movie.  Morgan isn’t too keen on the commission though, as he wants to retire and be with his lovely new girlfriend Sophie (Daniela Melchior). 

He also has a potentially interesting surrogate father/son relationship with Caldwell, which is disappointingly never explored, along with most of the relationships in the film.

Motive and clarity of storytelling are subservient, indeed virtually non-existent in favour of gunplay and lots of it.  The $6 million Morgan is promised for the job for example is never mentioned again and for much of the film Golding, normally a fine actor, seems to have given up on trying to make sense of it all and just keeps running around firing his gun as required. 

The film also stars Noomi Rapace as Falk, a character with a double life as the as the head of some mysterious security agency (brunette and specs) and chief villain (frosty blonde hair and weird eyes).  No idea what she wanted apart from being villainous.

To its credit the film, shot mainly in Italy, looks very good, when we get a chance to look at the scenery and the architecture.  Director of the film Camille Delamarre’s only interest however seems to be in “bang bang, you’re dead” and other scenes of murder and mutilation combined with a lot of frantic activity, so it’s all sadly rather boring. 

Apart from Sam Neill’s scenes that is.  He is actually rather good.