DVD Review: Assassin

By John Corrado

★½ (out of 4)

Since Bruce Willis has announced his retirement from acting due to his diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia, the film Assassin serves as his final role. As such, the movie is being sold under his name, but Willis is merely a supporting player in the sci-fi flick, which offers a muddled, disappointing hodge podge of influences from The Matrix to Inception.

Willis plays Valmora, a shadowy figure who is leading a covert military operation of assassins who use microchip technology to “hack” other people’s minds. By implanting a worm-like device in their brain stems, “soldiers” are able to remotely take over their bodies and carry out dangerous missions, from a bathtub in a warehouse.

When Alexa (Nomzamo Mbatha) finds out that her veteran husband Sebastian (Mustafa Shakir) was killed during one of these missions, she is brought in to finish what he started, by assuming another woman’s identity and taking out Adrian (Dominic Purcell), the crime lord responsible for his death.

The film serves as the feature directorial debut of Jesse Atlas, who is expanding upon his 2017 short film Let Them Die Like Lovers. The screenplay, which Atlas co-wrote with Aaron Wolfe (who also co-wrote the short), tells a confusing and overly convoluted story that feels poorly explained, with hard to follow internal logic. The film feels rushed at 87 minutes, like it’s missing a lot of scenes that would have helped explain the premise and deepen the relationships between the characters.

This is an example of a first feature that tries to be overly ambitious, but just isn’t very good, building to one big eye-roll of an ending. It feels like it never rises above being a pallid imitation of its influences, including some vague body horror elements borrowed from early Cronenberg. The action scenes appear somewhat amateurish in their staging, and fail to offer much excitement, with Willis in particular sadly feeling like he isn’t given enough to do. It’s a real pity that this will very likely be his final film.

Bonus Features (DVD):