Assassins

Assassins

Believe me when I say that I have no problem with movie magic. I believe in flying bikes and boats eaten by sharks; even talking pigs wouldn’t throw me off too much. But, sorry to say, I don’t buy “Assassins.” There are some impossibilities so far-fetched that even Forrest Gump could do a better job rewriting this story.

The film stars Sylvester Stallone as Robert Rath, a meticulous and discreet professional hit man. Antonio Banderas plays Miguel Bain, his antithesis: a brash young punk who believes more in the flamboyant gunslinger style of assassination. They haven’t met when the movie opens, but they receive their orders on matching laptops (the kind where you just put one hand on the keyboard and rattle it in one place and words get perfectly typed).

Stallone is sent to kill a guy at a funeral and is startled when somebody else does the job. It is Banderas, hiding behind a nearby tombstone, and he’s soon captured by the police only to escape and get into a taxi that Stallone has stolen in order to pick him up and find out who he is. (Stallone’s own brilliant plan for the hit was to conceal a weapon in a cast on his arm and mingle with the mourners. His getaway plan was not explained.) The men are soon shooting at one another, for reasons that are explained without the explanations explaining anything.

Soon the two men find themselves once again working on the same case and competing for the same prize a $2 million reward for a stolen computer disc. The disc is in the possession of a woman named Electra (Julianne Moore), who lives alone with her cat in what looks like an abandoned airplane hangar filled with neo-Gothic junk she bought at Pier 1 during its liquidation sale after going out of business because nobody wanted any of that stuff anymore.

She is also a computer whiz who has set up an elaborate scheme for exchanging the disc with some Dutch bad guys. (She has a radio controlled toy truck in a hotel air shaft but never mind.) Once again, Stallone and Banderas leave bodies littered all over the hotel and then, as the reward is raised to $20 million, find themselves in Mexico for a final showdown.

This is where things start getting silly.

The endless last sequence of the film (which is very long and very slow) involves a situation where Stallone plans to enter a bank, collect $20 million in cash and leave. Banderas plans to shoot him from the window of the ancient abandoned hotel across the street. But Stallone knows that Banderas will do that, so he enlists Electra in a plan to sit in a cafe and radio him with updates.

He knows (for reasons buried in the past) that Banderas eventually will grow impatient while waiting and after six or seven hours will be compelled to go into the bank to see if Stallone is still there. And Banderas of course will have to leave his guns outside. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happens, and the two men nod and chat a little. Banderas then goes back outside and returns to his sniping post in the crumbling hotel, and Stallone collects the money and goes outside to be shot.

That was easy!

What did you just say? I mean, there is some kind of a crazy plan, where Electra is supposed to get into the hotel while Banderas is in the bank and take his rifle. But this hotel is falling apart, and she falls through the floor. It’s the first of several times when various characters fall through so many floors that I’m amazed the hotel still has any floors left. So when Stallone comes out of the bank, Banderas is in a window with a rifle aimed at him, and what does Stallone do?

Duck for cover? No, he turns to welcome death or whatever, but then he gets saved by an interesting interpretation of the Fallacy of The Talking Killer which is of course that old movie trick where instead of shooting somebody, the killer talks to him. This may be the first time I’ve ever seen it used on a killer who was talking to himself.

There were many moments during this movie where I felt puzzled. One of them has to do with its key shooting scene. When you see it you’ll know which one I mean; you may find yourself wondering how it happened, as I did. The mechanics seem to defy both logic and physics.

Other problems with this movie: (1) How can a guy hanging outside the window of a cab avoid being hurt when you crash it against the side of a bus? (2) If you hold a table up in front of you after a gas explosion blows you out of a third-floor window, will it really save your life? (3) If you’re holding a briefcase containing a bomb, do you throw it out the car window or wait till you can drive down an alley and put it in a convenient dumpster?

(4) If you know there’s a sniper waiting for you to come out the front door of a bank building, does it occur to you maybe to slip out the back, sneak up on the guy and kill him rather than relying on a ditzy computer nerd who says she’s never killed anybody before and can’t shoot anybody now? (5) Do you question the political and history credentials of a man who tells you he had to fake his death in 1980 because “the Cold War was ending”?

Looking over the movie’s cast list for answers to these questions and many others, I see that Stallone and Banderas play characters named Rath and Bain. Rath becomes Wrath. Bain is French for “bath.” Wrath and Bath. Nice ring to it. I was looking up Electra when the phone rang, bringing me to my senses again, as Hunter Thompson wrote way back in 1972 after seeing Fellini’s “Roma,” which also left him somewhat at a loss.

But not nearly as at a loss as this one did me.

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