The Matador Review

January 6, 2006 10:21 AM
by [email]

So reads the tagline for Richard Shepard’s new black comedy, which begins like a Bond lover’s woozy nightmare (our hero paints his toenails and can’t hold his liquor) and shifts to sweetly screwball comedy in the salesman’s Denver home.

James Bond doesn’t really show up here, but his alter ego, Pierce Brosnan, seems to be having the time of his life. Brosnan’s Julian Noble, a womanizing assassin who finds himself with a bad case of the shakes, might be the most lewd yet lovable character since Bad Santa (he hankers for “all the teenage twat in Thailand”), which spells confusion and hilarity when he meets Danny Wright, a straight and narrow salesman, in a Mexico bar.

Since Danny is played by Greg Kinnear, who could probably play a mannequin and be interesting, he’s more than just a foil for Julian Noble’s oddities- and there are oddities aplenty.

Shepard has a uniquely random sense of humor, so Noble pranks assassinations, says “see you, wouldn’t want to be you!” to a disdainful adolescent, and obliviously jumps into a shark tank. I’m not so sure his antics had much to do with anything, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t think they were hilarious.

The set-up is as follows: sleezy Julian and disgruntled Danny meet in a bar. They’ve both had awful days, and Julian, the more jovial of the two, decides to show Danny what being a hit man is all about. When the deal Danny’s been working on falls through and Julian, out of the blue, is wanted dead, the off-beat buddy comedy takes a darker turn.

But not too dark. Back in Denver, Danny and his delightfully eccentric wife Bean (the estimable Hope Davis) have slapstick sex on their washing machine (another random and memorable Shepard touch). Then Julian shows up in the middle of the night and, in my favorite scene, dances with Bean after displaying his guns over a delicious-looking course of pecan pie.

Julian predictably asks Danny to help him finish the one job that will save his life, but what follows is completely unexpected. The whole film, in fact, is genuinely surprising, and not just because Shepard opens with a shot of the man best known as James Bond lying with a babe in bed. Sporting a scruffy beard and gleaming sense of humor, Brosnan plays the joke for all it’s worth.

Though the time shifts and shuffling locales border on confusing, the actors’ rapport is so winning and the writing is so deft that plot leaps work. Focusing on three memorable characters, and casting actors who make them anything but cardboard, Shepard is able to balance real suspense, tender drama, and raunchy comedy. The result is that rare movie- a black comedy that’s as funny as it is dark.

Grade: A-