Katherine Heigl and Ashton Kutcher play husband and wife in the spy-comedy Killers. While it’s no Oscar-winner, it does have some nice jokes
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Film review + trailer: Killers (12a)
By Kim FrancisJune 23, 2010
Stars Ashton Kutcher, Katherine Heigl, Tom Selleck, Catherine O’Hara
Coming from the director of 2001’s Legally Blonde, you might expect Killers to be a smart and sassy comedy with an original premise full of sharp humour. Killers is none of these things but that isn’t to say that Robert Luketic’s derivative romantic assassin farce is entirely unenjoyable.
Spencer Aimes (Ashton Kutcher) is a CIA assassin disillusioned with killing people for a living. What he really wants is to find a nice girl with whom to settle into suburban bliss.
So when he meets newly-single daddy’s girl Jen Kornfeldt (Katherine Heigl) while on another dangerous job, this time in the south of France, he decides she’s the one and makes this assignment his last-ever, much to his boss’s chagrin.
Three years later, Jen is still blissfully unaware of her husband’s past and is understandably shocked when it transpires that there’s a bounty on his head and all of their neighbours are hired guns eager to cash in on the $20 million pay-out.
Cue action, uproar and myriad ‘comedy’ set-ups.
See more film trailers on getreading.co.uk
As a stand-alone film, you may well exit the cinema seriously underwhelmed. But when you compare it with the recent Gerard Butler/Jennifer Aniston vehicle The Bounty Hunter, with which it shares many characteristics, you’ll likely come away thinking you’ve just seen a masterpiece.
Where The Bounty Hunter is a spectacularly bad exercise in excruciating caper comedy and a prime example of how this sort of thing can go horrifically awry, Killers draws on hits like
Mr and Mrs Smith and Meet The Parents while sprinkling a touch of Judd Apatow-lite humour into the mix to bring audiences a not totally awful movie.
It relies on the chemistry of its two leads and amiable performances from veterans Tom Selleck and Catherine O’Hara as Jen’s parents to bolster an uninventive also-ran.
Katherine Heigl is beautiful, yet refreshingly ordinary, making her a great draw for a unisex audience. Kutcher, meanwhile, is self-deprecating, naturally funny and eminently watchable (in lightweight fare), even if he does make an unlikely assassin.
While much of the gags here are puerile or obvious – with jokes largely revolving around Heigl’s ample bosom or Selleck’s equally impressive ‘tache – if you go in expecting little, you just might come out pleasantly surprised.
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