Wild Target (**3/4)

Some fifteen million people went to see a movie featuring Bill Nighy and Rupert Grint this past weekend. For nearly all of them, that movie was Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1. But a much smaller number, whose fantasies presumably involve hired assassins, like the one Nighy plays, rather than teen wizards, would have seen this lightweight caper film. The essense of the caper film is to make the heroes criminal, if not by trade, then by circumstance, and to make the crime seem fun. Nighy is Victor, the middle-aged professional and Grint the callow “apprentice,” though he thinks his mentor is merely working “undercover.” In between is delightful Emily Blunt, who, though British, has somehow managed not to appear in any of the Potter films, perhaps because she is too young. Her character is neither assassin nor innocent. Having clumsily masterminded an art-forgery scheme, she is in fact Victor’s target.

If a threesome rather than a duo can be said to “meet cute,” and meeting cute can involve people getting shot in a parking garage, then that is how the professional, his target, and the bystander wind up teaming up. The bystander is Grint’s character, and although he is kind of a third wheel—Ron Weasley to Nighy’s and Blunt’s Harry Potter and Hermione—he does show some additional range. In predictable fashion, the other two bicker a lot, then suddenly not. The young lady’s change of heart is too facile, and the film is more fun when they are at odds.

A notable thing about this caper film is that the protagonist is a murderer, even if he is impeccably mannered, as is typical for the caper film. Usually we are encouraged to root for the hero of the caper film via the time-honored technique of making the villains scummy. That’s true here, as the targets are rival hit men, but it’s still unusual for the hero to be seen as having (mistakenly) shot innocent bystanders. In fact, part of the reason we are supposed to root for Victor is that he’s a better hitman than his rival, London’s top assassin. (However, he cannot bring himself to kill a parrot who keeps saying his name after he kills the owner. So he steals the bird.) When the apprentice—who feels bad even upon shooting a man in self-defense—finds out that Victor is not just a detective, one might suspect he’d feel some unease, but that would be more emotional heft than anything on display here.

Nighy, among the most ubiquitous UK actors (Love, Actually, Shaun of the Dead, Pirate Radio), gives credibility to the repressed Victor, who has always been a solo act ever since he took up the trade of his father. The humor is light, but generally on target, in this remake of a French film, but it is inessential.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz Bourse and reviewed 11/24/10