THE KILLER'S GAME (AMAZON PRIME) (2024)

SYNOPSIS: In the new action-comedy THE KILLER’S GAME, when top hitman Joe Flood (Dave Bautista) is diagnosed with a terminal illness, he decides to take matters into his own hands – by taking a hit out on himself. But when the very hitmen he hired also target his ex-girlfriend (Sofia Boutella) , he must fend off an army of assassin colleagues and win back the love of his life before it’s too late.

MOVIE REVIEW:

The last thing you need to know about The Killer’s Game is that it’s actually based on a book by Jay Bonansinga. No offence to the American writer but the movie adaptation is an ultraviolent piece of work that literally reeks of familiar mindless entertainment that you probably seen a thousand times over.

Directed by stuntman turned choreographer turned director, J.J. Perry and stars Dave Bautista as Joe Flood, an assassin who tries to stop his own assassination. At this point, you are going to dismiss the story as moronic and poorly conceived. Not a surprise because it is.

The story has it that Joe is one of the best assassins stationed in Europe and fate has it that he is going to fall in love with a dancer, Maize (Sofia Boutella). But when he is diagnosed as suffering from the fatal Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, he decides to order an assassination on himself via a broker named Antoinette (Pom Klementieff) so that Maize can collect his life insurance policy.

It turned out the lab has a mixup of the patients records and Joe doesn’t have the disease at all. He tries to call off the contract but the broker who is also his enemy refuses and Joe has to fight his way through numerous assassins who are on their way to collect the bounty.

Nobody in the right mind would want to watch a romance or dramatic movie starring Dave Bautista although the former wrestler did publicly declares he wants to flex his dramatic chops. At least in The Killer’s Game, he has his own meet cute moment. Momentarily of course.

J.J. Perry knows exactly what the fans wants so he fills the movie with every over-the-top fights and actions possible. Among the assassins are a South Korean gang, Scottish brothers Angus Mackenzie (Scott Adkins) and Rory Mackenzie (Drew McIntyre), a pair of English strippers, a Spanish dancer and lastly, Lovedahl (Terry Crews) who threw in one or two funny lines.

Joe Flood moves and fights exactly like John Wick. Unstoppable and invincible. Every assassin meets their fate in the most bloodiest way ever with the inputs of some poorly rendered CGI blood spill. The fights are mostly absurd and Perry and his team treat the entire affair like some sort of brutal live-action cartoon which gets a few good laughs along the way.

We can’t say The Killer’s Game is a worthy action movie but it’s far more exciting than Bautista’s My Spy franchise. Forget about the shallow story, numerous forgettable characters and just come in for the gore and impalement.

MOVIE RATING:

Review by Linus Tee