Directed by Mathieu Kassowitz. Written by Nicolas Boukhrief and Mathieu Kassowitz.
Television has warped the minds of our listless youth and turned them into uncaring wastrels capable of the ultimate sin, says Mathieu Kassowitz with Assassin(s), a movie with the outlook and insight of a self-important teenager as it makes its points in the first 45 minutes, then spends 90 minutes rehashing them to ever-diminishing returns.
It starts well enough. Director-writer-editor Kassowitz also stars as Max, a 20-something going nowhere. He lives with his mother, attends a vocational school drilling holes in stuff, and gets stoned every evening. He’s a petty thief, and his accomplice, a high schooler, his closest friend. Life passes before his goldfish eyes until an old man Mr. Wagner steps in front of him with a proposition: become his hitman mentee.
Mr. Wagner has a different problem. His father was a murderer-for-hire, and his father before him. Wagner’s fathered no children, and so he has no one to pass his “craft” onto. For whatever reason, he sees a successor in Max, and they form an uncanny duo, this bellicose senior and gormless junior. There’s dark comedy in watching Max take on this ludicrous apprenticeship he limps into, and for Wagner to treat murder as a trade to pass on like it’s plumbing, but Kassowitz quickly squanders any goodwill.
Assassin(s) suddenly begins to take itself very seriously, and everything turns sour. Where there was initially an ironic distance, there’s now a banal sincerity, and Assassin(s) overstays its welcome with tedious tirades, written and visual, about how television, video games, porn and advertising has created a pacified generation in Max, and an even more damaged youth on the way.
Kassowitz pieces his movie together with the go-to tricks of any blowhard storyteller: voiceovers he employs to add omnipotent heft, but which accomplish nothing except show how little care he’s taken in his narrative construction, as well as several identical montages that try to beat you into submission. One channel-flipping sequence meant to show the deteriorating headspace of Max ends with Kassowitz running, almost unedited, an entire Nike ad, just so he can use the tagline “Just Do It” as a narrative device. How little respect can you have for your own filmmaking?
It’s a shame, because Kassowitz is not an ineffective filmmaker, and Assassin(s) has striking sequences. He wore several hats in the movie’s production, and you wonder if he had not been better off had he left it to his collaborators, as the movie’s downfall stems from poor writing and (lack of) editing. In front of the camera, Kassowitz lets himself down too, as he doesn’t evoke a single compelling emotion as Max.
The upside is his co-stars Michel Serrault and Mehdi Benoufa do well as Wagner, an angry emblem of boomer hypocrisy, and Mehdi, the youth already lost to the void. I don’t think Kassowitz scales back his performance for them to shine, however, it’s just that there’s little to find interesting about Max, his predicament, and evolution over the course of the movie, of which there’s little. Which leads us back to the essence of what’s wrong with Kassowitz’ movie in the first place.
Assassin(s) is about a wholly unexceptional man who’s swept up in a middling affair that still proves far out of his depth. The same goes for Assassin(s): an unexceptional, middling affair grappling with things far beyond it.
Mikkel Frederiksen 