‘Assassin Club’ Review
Stars: Henry Golding, Sam Neill, Noomi Rapace, Daniela Melchior, Claudio Del Falco, Jimmy Jean-Louis, Anastasia Doaga | Written by Thomas Dunn | Directed by Camille Delamarre
Henry Golding and Noomi Rapace headline this hitman mystery thriller from director Camille Delamarre. Sadly, Assassin Club isn’t going to do either of them any favours and the only mystery about it is how it got made in the first place.
Golding plays Morgan, one of those international assassins who’s quite happy to murder for a living, as long as his targets are certifiable bad guys like drug lords or sex traffickers. He receives his orders from Caldwell (Sam Neill), his handler-slash-mentor, and otherwise enjoys a quiet life with his girlfriend Sophie (Daniela Melchior), a primary school teacher who remains blissfully ignorant of his extra-curricular activities. However, all that changes when Morgan accepts a contract to take out seven international assassins, only to discover that all seven hit people have also been hired to kill him, putting Sophie in unwitting danger. Meanwhile, a pair of cops (Noomi Rapace and Jimmy Jean-Louis) are also on Morgan’s tail.
Delamarre has some form with shooty action thrillers, having previously directed the likes of Brick Mansions and The Transporter Refuelled. However, her directing skills have let her down on this occasion, as the action scenes are entirely generic and forgettable, especially when set against a certain other hitman thriller that’s currently still playing in cinemas.
However, it’s the script that really lets Assassin Club down, dropping the ball on everything from dialogue to plot. It veers from being needlessly complex to utterly incomprehensible and back again with alarming alacrity. In fact, the script is so bad that you end up spending a large part of the movie wondering just how much money the producers must have thrown at Golding, Rapace and Neill for them to say yes to this nonsense. One plot development, in particular, is so laughably stupid that you almost have to admire the scriptwriters for attempting it in the first place.
Golding has proven his credentials as a romantic lead, but he’s less than convincing as a skilled international hitman, and his facial expression frequently seems to suggest he’s fully aware of how bad this movie is and he’s trying not to think about it. Rapace, at least, gets to have a little fun with the role, though her character design feels a little over the top, especially for someone who needs a little anonymity every so often.
Neill tries to inject as much character into his part as possible too (he’s interrupted while playing the harpsichord at one point), and it’s clear he’s invented an entire backstory for his somewhat louche character, one that the script just bulldozes over. As for Melchior, she makes a decent enough impression as Sophie, but the script gives her precious little to do, and isn’t really interested in exploring the emotional impact that might result from discovering the father of your unborn child is a cold-blooded killer.
The rest of the cast are almost insultingly underwritten, especially when you consider that there are meant to be seven deadly assassins – the second the movie ends, you’ll be hard-pressed to remember more than three of them. Also, this is the sort of movie that requires the majority of its contract killers to be hulking bruisers, all of whom would definitely stand out in a crowd.
The film’s editing is all over the place too, whether it’s simply not being able to tell who’s shooting at who, or more baffling choices like a clumsily put-together sequence involving a graveyard visit that’s intercut with a punch-up.
On top of that, the production values are frequently hilarious – for example, the action is set in multiple European cities, according to the numerous captions and establishing shots, but you never get any actual location shooting, so it all looks like the same place. Similarly, there’s a webpage glimpsed at some point that suggests the production forgot to hire someone for that particular job and only realised five minutes before shooting.
In short, it’s frankly baffling that Assassin Club is getting a cinema release because it’s got straight-to-streaming written all over it. At least it goes out on a laugh, when the closing scene indicates that someone thinks this has sequel potential.
* 1/5
Assassin Club is in UK cinemas from today, Friday April 14th.
