The besuited assassin seems to only exist in films. Perhaps it’s time to put them out of their misery
The central gimmick of new movie Killers Anonymous is an AA-style support group where various underworld assassins come to “share”. That’s about all it has to bring to this flagging party, other than underlining how utterly divorced the movies’ concept of the “hitman” has become from reality. The world is tragically full of gun violence and targeted assassinations, but the perpetrators are rarely cool international assassins who make a clean shot from a rooftop far away, or walk away from explosions without turning round (thus making it painfully obvious that they’re the culprit!). And yet these characters have become a tiresome fixture of modern moviegoing. Someone needs to take them out.
Where Killers Anonymous assembles a motley group of recovering assassins (including Gary Oldman and Jessica Alba), we might easily form our own circle of killaholics. Pulling up the first chair would be Keanu Reeves’s badass assassin John Wick. One estimate puts his kill count over his three movies at 299, so … work to do. Joining him could be Mads Mikkelsen from Polar, Helen Mirren from Red, Jason Statham’s “Mechanic”, George Clooney’s “American”, Pierce Brosnan’s “Matador”. The queue stretches round the block. Here’s Killing Eve’s Villanelle. Here’s Bill Hader’s Barry. Samuel L Jackson from The Hitman’s Bodyguard sends his apologies. He can’t make it because he’s filming the sequel.