Cast: Sylvester Stallone ('Robert Rath')
Antonio Banderas ('Miguel Bain')
Julianne Moore ('Electra')
Director: Richard Donner
Released by Warner Brothers.
Rating: +3.5. (scale: -5=abomination to +5=epiphany).
I never liked Stallone much and have always avoided his movies like the plague. When I couldn't help it and, overcome by sloth and laziness, turned on the TV and watched abominations like 'Cobra' this usually confirmed my low opinion of the man as an actor of anything. 'Rocky' never did it for me either. I never got past the first few minutes. I still don't know what people see in it.
So, why should ASSASSINS be the movie to change my mind about the man and the actor? After all, if you listen to people, it's supposed to be just some ponderous would-be action flick with stereotypical cardboard characters and unconvincing perfomances overall. Nothing, it seems, to provide much of a character-acting opportunity for anybody; least of all Stallone!
Well, surprise, surprise, but ASSASSINS is much more than that. It's a deft mixture of a (sometimes rather slowly-paced) action drama and a study of three desperately lonely, even twisted, human beings, who happen to cross each others' paths with some predictable and some not-quite-expected results.
The story:
Robert Rath, assassin extraordinaire, with a record of killings as long as a reel of film, has had enough. It's been getting that way for some time, but his last contract, the killing of a colleague, does it for him. He's also getting old. He has to wear glasses when reading his computer screen, and his moment of weakness, when he allows his last 'mark' the dignity of committing (albeit supervised) suicide, rather than killing him himself, demonstrates that he's becoming somewhat less detached than he ought to be. He just hasn't got the mind-set anymore which allowed him to accept a contract fifteen years ago to kill his friend, Russian Nicolai Tashlekoff. Besides, that particular assignment still occasionally haunts him. The images of his former friend emerging from a bank in San Juan, looking up at the top of the building where Rath was waiting with a scoped rifle, knowing that he was going to die, and knowing who was doing the job... they keep flashing back to him.
One more job he's going to do and then he's out for good. Problem is that apparently his shadowy employer, who only exists as an anonymous correspodent at the other end of an email connection, seems to have hired another assassin, Miguel Bain, to do the same job. Bain beats Rath to the kill. Rath, angry at the duplicity, tries to corner Bain, but the latter manages to escape both the police and Rath. Indeed, as it turns out, he's rather keen to test his skills against Rath, whom he's always admired, but who, he thinks (quite correctly) is getting a bit soft around the edges now.
His mysterious employer offers Rath another job. The elimination of surveillance expert/hacker called Electra - who's stolen a disk full of information worth a lot of money to certain people - and the retrieval of the disk. Electra is trying to sell the disk to a bunch of Dutch buyers for a load of cash. A meeting at a hotel is arranged. Everything seems to go well until it becomes obvious that Bain again has been contracted for the same job as Rath. Bain kills the buyers and a load of Interpol agents at the scene, but fails to get to Electra, who is saved by Rath - who, when confronting her, realizes that he has reached the point where he finds himself unable to kill in cold blood.
Rath and Electra go on the run, trying to sell the valuable disk to Rath's duplicitous employer for two million dollars. A meeting is arranged for the exchange, but, though Rath delivers a laptop computer with the information, the case with the money is rigged with a bomb. By sheer luck the Rath and Electra avoid being killed. Rath also finds out that Electra has been hedging her bets, and given the treacherous buyer a computer without the required information.
The pair now 'up' the price to twenty million dollars. An exchange is arranged. Rath is to deliver the computer to a bank in San Juan, in exchange for the cash. Ironically, the bank is the same, outside which, ten years ago, Rath killed his friend Nicolai. And this time it's Bain who's given the contract to kill Rath. Bain, with a fine sense of history, elects to do things the same way Rath did all those years ago. Rath anticipates this (that's why he selected this particular setting), and him and Electra set up a scheme to foil Bain's plan.
The plan almost goes awry, and only Electra's intervention saves Rath's life. During the final climactic fight between Rath and Bain a third party intervenes: their employer, who turns out to be none other than Nicolai, who, fifteen years ago, faked his own death by wearing a bullet-proof vest, since he just KNEW that Rath was going to 'go for the heart' - and who, since then, has become Rath's sadowy employer. Indeed, it was Nicolai himself to took out the contract on himself, and used Rath to 'disappear'. Rath had been outguessed and outmanoeuvred by Nicolai, just like Bain was now by Rath and Electra. History coming full circle.
Still, there are a couple of twists in the final events, and when the dust settles, it's Rath and Electra who are left standing and go off into the sunset with the money.
End of story.
Pretty formulaic stuff, and nothing that, by itself, would attract a great deal of attention. What sets this drama apart from a gazillion other action flicks though are its characters, and a certain brooding atmosphere, which imbues ASSASSINS with a quality rarely seen in this genre. Stallone, Banderas, and Moore, each deliver performances which make the characters quite credible, even though in Banderas' case the character is so over the top that he's almost too much to take. Still, Banderas pulls it off with a kind of maniacal glee and reckless abandon that just too much fun to miss. 'Desperado' leaps to mind, only that here Banderas is the bad guy.
Stallone is an excellent ageing assassin. A lonely man, whose relationships with others consist of email exchanges, or of him planting a bullet in them. His estrangement became complete when he killed his friend a more decade before. Rath is a sad character. One wonders how he came to be what he is, because there's an air of gentleness and conscience about him. Makes one wonder what the world has to do to a human being to make him into a killer.
Julianne Moore, as Electra, portrays an equally lonely human being, whose main contact with others also consists of email exchanges, or of her viewing them with video cameras hidden in their apartment. They don't even know she's there, but she's as involved in their lives as can possibly be.
When Rath and Electra are thrown together there is an instant rapport, tinged though as it is by cynicism and suspicion. She sees his face above a gun that's about to kill her (but then doesn't), and he sees in her eyes, maybe for the first time, a human being that he cannot kill. Circumstances force them to stay together, even though the exposure is a strain for both of them. At one point Electra (after an argument with Rath) asks for privacy, since, as she says, "I haven't been with a single human being for this long" for a long time. As she turns away to leave Rath looks after her. "Neither have I," he says softly, but she doesn't hear him.
Rath and Electra people are sick to the core, but they have features which ultimately redeem them. Like a conscience, which just needed some prodding.
Bain hasn't got a conscience, and neither has Rath's 'friend' Nicolai. That's why they have to die, and why Rath and Electra survive. A modern morality tale, which we've seen in a thousand different ways before, but its well done, and deserves much more credit than it has.
There's no sex in this movie. Just a fairly chaste kiss. In another ironic twist, the one occasion where Rath, with uncharacteristic shyness, open himself up to Electra, (who's standing behind a curtain on a balcony) and tells her what she means to him it turns out that she actually isn't there at all any more, and that his words were addressed to nobody but himself. Still, despite all this lack of explicit romance, it's there all the time, from the moment they meet - and there's no doubt what's going to happen after it's all over.
I don't know what you look for in a movie, but if it's a well-told story of redemption, an action flick with plenty of shooting to keep everybody happy, a bit of romance, and a happy ending - well, it almost as good on video as on the big screen.
"One man's 'magic' is another man's engineering." L Long
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