DVD review: Killers

A woman meets and falls in love with a man without knowing that he is a spy.

If you got the distinct impression of having watched this movie at least a couple of times without knowing it rest assured, it’s true. The “Oh my god! My husband is an undercover spy!” it’s something that Hollywood seems to really love, we got so many iterations of this basic premise, sometimes she is the spy, maybe they are both spies but they don’t know it.

Anyway as usual like seems to be very complicated for these undercover James Bond, eventually their jobs interfere with their real life, the con is discovered and they need to face their spouse with “I got a really high paid job with many, many perks. Do you want to visit the white house next week?”.

Jokes aside this sub genre spawned at least two excellent movies, “True Lies” and “Mr and Mrs Smith”, so evidently it’s possible to do this stuff right.

Killers clearly aim to do a rom com version of the aforementioned cliché. Sadly this requires funny jokes, which this movie clearly lacks. The romantic part is decent but there is no spark between the two protagonists. Ashton Kutcher, it’s there physically but it’s not really there, there is a strange kind of actorial void. Notionally he is supposed to be the impossibly cool guy but, c’mon, we are talking about Ashton Kutcher, he simply lacks the necessary charisma. Katherine Heigl is also oddly detached, she still has good comic timing but she still plays the trademarked Katherine Heigl character which we had to endure during her last four movies and still isn’t able to bring it to a semblance of life. We know that she can be good, we saw it in “Knocked up” but considering this is her only movie that she doesn’t like I fear that this isn’t going to happen anytime soon.

There is some action but it’s so tame that I can’t help but wonder why they bothered; we saw better stuff in any random episode of Chuck.

Not even for Rom Com fans, this movie will appeal only to Katherine Heigl completists.