Grosse Pointe Blank – tape 2619

It’s movie time today, and over to Sky Premier for Grosse Pointe Blank.

I really like this film, even though it seems to include one of the things I don’t tend to like in movies – its protagonist is a bad person. However, in this case, our protagonist is John Cusack, plays Martin Blank, a professional assassin.

He’s a freelance assassin, who has an office manager and everything. She’s played by Cusack’s sister Joan in a small part that benefits hugely from having someone as good as her playing it.

Dan Aykroyd plays another assassin, who once worked with Cusack, but now they’re competing for the same contracts. He wants to form a union for their profession by Cusack isn’t the joining type. In the opening, Cusack foils an assassination by sniping the perp who’s on a bicycle, but when he’s finished, Aykroyd is there to kill the original target, rather ruining his job. They meet up shortly afterwards, and I love the body language as they’re both jumpily facing off like a couple of nervous gunfighters.

Martin is also in therapy. His therapist, Alan Arkin, knows what he does, and doesn’t want to treat him, but Martin just turns up anyway, and Arkin is too scared to refuse.

After a hit goes wrong, he has to take another contract in Detroit, and both Arkin and his assistant tell him he should attend his 10th school reunion in his old home town, which he reluctantly does. Not that reluctantly, though, because his school sweetheart Debi is still in town, running the local radio station. She’s played by Minnie Driver and is just as much fun as Cusack, and isn’t overjoyed to see him, as ten years earlier, he stood her up for the school prom, and disappeared.

He’s rather upset when he finds his childhood home has been knocked down and replaced by an Ultimart. There’s a great sequence where one of the assassins on his tail takes him on in the Ultimart, and they’re blasting away at each other while the clerk is oblivious because he’s listening to music and playing an arcade version of Doom II.

Also after him are Hank Azaria and K Todd Freeman, two NSA agents who are working with Aykroyd to take Cusack out.

Jeremy Piven plays another former school friend, now a realtor, who’s just a little too manic.

The film is full of delightful moments, like when, at the reunion, Cusack hold’s someone’s baby while she fetches its bottle, and he stares at the baby and the baby stares back. For some reason, it made me quite emotional.

It would seem that Cusack and Piven were probably good friends, because, when Cusack is attacked by another assassin at the school, and kills him, Piven has to help him dispose of the body.

Sadly for Cusack, Driver witnessed him killing the assassin and left, obviously rethinking her recent choices. But later she comes to his hotel room, and they do something characters in romantic comedies never ever do. They talk about it, and he’s honest with her. This obviously doesn’t solve everything, because she’s horrified he’s a hired killer, but it’s nice to see honesty for all that.

His assistant is busy shutting the office down, now that his career as an assassin is probably unworkable, but he’s left her a little going away present. “It’s profit sharing, you deserve it.”

Then, just out of curiosity, he looks at the profile of the victim he was in town to kill, and discovers that it’s actually Minnie Driver’s father. “The design division wants me dead over a leaky sunroof?” So then there’s a fun climax where he has to stop various killers killing her father, including Aykroyd.

I guess the absurdist aspects of this movie let me overlook the deep moral ambiguities and just enjoy it as a smart, funny rom-com with a lot of gunplay as well. What can I say? I like what I like and I’m obviously not always consistent. But this is such a lot of fun.

After this, recording stops, and underneath there’s an older recording, it’s the end of Speed 2: Cruise Control. This wasn’t a good film, but they do, at least, go out with a bang, exploding an entire oil tanker.

Then, randomly, there’s a whole extra movie here. It’s The Glimmer Man, a Steven Segal cop movie. Keenan Ivory Wayans plays LA Cop Jim Campbell, investigating ‘The Family Man’ serial killer, who’s killing couples and crucifying their bodies.

Steven Segal plays the cop from another district who’s also been assigned to the case. He has an unusual dress sense, and is interested a lot in Chinese herbalism. I don’t know why, but I think these might be story elements contributed by Segal, along with a moment during a standoff with a lot of criminals where he says he doesn’t fight because he’s a buddhist. Spoiler – he does fight.

The bad guy is the always reliable Bob Gunton, who has been importing Russian weapons or something, and had faked a couple of the serial killer deaths to kill his enemies and put the police off his scent.

Also involved is Brian Cox, who’s working with Gunton, but who also has a past with Segal in Special Ops.

There’s also a brief appearance from Stephen Tobolowsky, as the actual serial killer, although he features very little in the actual plot.

There’s a frankly ridiculous fight in a house that’s filled with doves in cages. It’s almost as if director John Gray had seen a John Woo film and thought ‘I could do that.’ Spoiler: He can’t.

There’s even some character development, as Detective Campbell is in a cinema watching Casablanca and crying his eyes out.

This is not a terrible film, but neither is it particularly good. It shares a problem with a lot of Steven Segal films in that his style of martial arts isn’t actually very filmic, and it mostly looks like he’s flapping his hands a lot. Also, the fights in this film are edited to within an inch of their lives – it’s so choppy that it’s hard to see what’s happening. Some of this might be down to it being Pan & Scan, but there’s an awful lot of cuts in each fight. It’s a bit exhausting. And frankly, there’s a fight in Grosse Pointe Blank that’s a better fight than anything in this film.

The tape ends during the credits of the movie.

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