Dan Franzen (dfranzen70) In The Matador, Pierce Brosnan plays a weary, boozy contract killer who just wants to be friends with Walter Mitty-like Greg Kinnear. Sounds like perfect casting, but the two leads don't really mesh, and the movie plods along endlessly, halfheartedly throwing in a twist near the end that only slightly mitigates the dullness.Julian Noble trots the globe, shooting, stabbing, and exploding those whom he's paid to terminate. He's not a likable chap, this Julian. He likes his liquor strong and his girls young, if you know what I mean. After a job in Mexico City, Julian learns he may be on his way out of his amorphous organization; he then bumps into Danny Wright (Kinnear), a businessman who believes he's just made a successful pitch to a local company. Julian comes off as kind of a rude jerk who may or not be telling the truth, but once he convinces (truthfully) Danny that he (Julian) is indeed a paid assassin, the two sort of become pals.It's a typical mismatched-buddies scenario - the loner and the married man, the odd duck and the straight arrow. Danny is married to Bean (Hope Davis), who becomes a little starstruck herself when she learns of Julian's occupation. But what of Julian's future? Will he soon be rubbed out by one of his own coworkers? This seems like a role tailor made for Brosnan, kind of a down-on-his-luck James Bond, but for some reason the character is a nasty, tough-to-read creep. Is he sincere or a sociopath? Is he being funny or deadly serious? When he pulls the old messing-with-you trope once too often, you start to wonder what he's all about - and you get no real satisfactory answers.The twist is okay, but in even a decent thriller it would have been terrific. Here it's just sort of there, as if the writers had realized they needed to tack on something a little off the beaten path and just kind of shoehorned it into the story. The Matador isn't incomprehensible, it's just maddeningly incoherent.

oneguyrambling For all the hubbub about pretty sparkling vampires, superheroes, serial killers and zombie hordes, there just might be more films made about the humble hit-man than you would ever think.The Matador is another, and a good one.The hit-man in question is Julian (Pierce Brosnan), a smooth operator who works on contract and never misses a target, leading to his feelings of invincibility and an attitude that is pure bravado. Julian thinks not of what he can do for others, but what others can do for – and to – him. He is a user unafraid of offending anyone, and largely unconcerned of what others think of him. After all he can kill them if he wants! But after a lifetime of continuing the same cycle: prep, kill, celebrate, fornicate, repeat without any real human contact or a place to call home Julian has begun to feel that his own lacks meaning. He wants human contact that doesn't end with a stain of some kind (Sorry!).Julian feels that he has found that when he meets Danny (Greg Kinnear). Danny is a hard working salesman of some kind in Mexico for a pitch meeting that he desperately needs to close with a big account. While the meeting went well he remains in Mexico until he is given a yea or nay in case he needs to wrap up some loose ends. Danny meets Julian after the initial warmth of a job well done has tempered somewhat, and they share a spirited but awkward and ultimately failed conversation at the bar when the talk turns to Danny's dead little boy and Julian simply has no way of empathising.A rocky start.Julian bumps into Danny the next day, apologising profusely and pleading with him to hang out and let Julian make up for it. Off to the bullfights they go! After some time Danny realises that his one-way conversation has told him nothing about Julian himself, after some probing Julian reluctantly opens up to Danny and informs him that he is in fact A Hit-man!!! Oh I mentioned that above didn't I? Let's just move on… Danny is a middle class everyman and is understandably blown away – so to speak – by the news he has been chillaxing with a real life hit-man. He questions Julian about the various aspects of the 'game' until Julian offers to take him on a dry run. This goes so well that Julian asks an aghast Danny to ride co-pilot with him on a real job.6 months later… Julian is still on the job, but is jaded, noticeably slower, and slipping… his facilitator tells him to life his game or he will be 'retired'.Julian concocts a plan to extricate himself from his situation, but it is one that requires Danny's involvement… The Matador has more in common with In Bruges than merely being about hit men. In both films the charm of the film is the interplay between the two leads and the fact that again in both films any thought of PC compromise is thrown out the window. Julian is a grade A w*nker and never pretends he is anything but, aside from his job he knows only alcohol, debauchery and fornication, and he tells Danny (and later his wife Bean) of the same in no uncertain terms. This has been his life for so long now that he simply knows of no other way and can't sugar coat his conversations. (His first reaction to a story about Danny's son's death is to start telling a joke.) This means that wide eyed Danny's reactions to Julian are never less than believable, while he doesn't shrink from the fact that Julian is a hit-man he is nevertheless genuinely scared – and perhaps a little jazzed – at what hanging around Julian might entail.The story is quite simple but I have deliberately left any mention of plot and plot twist out of this review, but I might add that even though The Matador is more about how Danny and Julian interact than what they actually do, the story is worth sticking around for.Final Rating – 7.5 / 10. At a pinch I might recommend In Bruges over The Matador, but you can't go wrong with either..

phillip-davies Pierce Brosnan should have got an award for his wickedly humorous performance as a sleazy yet humanly flawed hit-man. You can see all the Royal Shakespeare Company credentials from his early theatre days, before Hollywood hired him to perform - very profitably - for audiences of morons. Many, many such morons, who had him nicely stereotyped where they liked him, have tried to sink a film that embarrasses them with the sight of an assassin who is just like Bond, but stripped of the fake glamour that made his vulgarity and wickedness acceptable to their shallow morality - all rote observance without real soul as that hypocrite's comforter is. No doubt more could have been done to intensify the sinister side of the scenario - but then who can reasonably complain at having a grown-up comedy, at least, instead of yet another disgustingly stupid teen flick?Afer all, it is made perfectly clear (BIG SPOILER AHEAD) in the late flashback to the scene where it turns out we had wrongly assumed - just as Bean the wife had been lied to about this incident - that Danny righteously refused to open the door to Julian, whereas in fact the scene plays out to its conclusion only when we see that the distinctly ignoble Noble actually has qualms - if not exactly scruples! - about corrupting an only decent-ish man! This, of course, is just the sort of shifting moral perspective that makes our poor precious little PC darlings quite queasy, and sends them scurrying out of the cinema as fast as their little legs can carry them.It is making a creative jest of what some folk only see in absolutist and black-and-white terms that is so offensive to them. A more sinister, less likable assassin would have left them comfortable and untroubled - because he would not have touched them. The only honest good people are the relatively good, like Danny and Bean, who are at least honest enough to admit they have a weakness for this terrible man and his easy, sleazy good-natured dirty glamour, yet still preserve their own simple amiable decency. What saves this often horribly naive couple is that they have retained enough human curiosity and empathy to avoid the meaningless safety of that same prescriptive Political Correctness that can find little better to criticise this film for than showing a bullfight. The furore this caused entirely missed the point of a film that, after all, was called 'The Matador' precisely in order to show how strangely life-affirming the contemplation of Death can actually be! Indeed, such purging of our darker instincts and desires was no less than a religious act of moral salvation - 'catharsis' - in the ancient Greek tragedy.This is no Greek tragedy, of course, but the film does show a real awareness of the dark side, and simply chooses instead to tread delicately but deliberately around its sinister subject, with perhaps something of the wit of the Picador on his balletic feet, a spectacle which our metaphorical Matador commends to his new friend's attention.This is (as it were) the dying bull's gift to the man he recognises as his better. An undemonstratively brilliant little film, then, and as light and sharp as a short story or a Picador's lance, and beautifully weighted to the sad but dignified end it is directed towards.

funkyfry I enjoyed this movie quite a bit more than I necessarily expected to. I remember seeing some things about it around the time it was released and it sounded somewhat interesting but not like something I needed to rush out and see. After all, it's not like Greg Kinnear is the king of any sane person's film universe, although I used to enjoy him on "Movietime" and "E" doing the Talk Soup. Pierce Brosnan is somebody who I hadn't seen in a movie until a few years ago when I saw the excellent "Seraphim Falls", since I tend to avoid James Bond movies. But something about the pairing of these two guys seemed appealing, and the movie bears out that instinct. These guys are fun to watch together, they have a real natural chemistry that makes even some of the film's weaker scenes flow very neatly.I like the fact that this is sort of a tough, violent movie that has a decent amount of blood and sex in it, but it's not raunchy in the way that Quentin Tarantino's movies are, not in a sort of way that's designed to appeal to 15 year old boys. The whole joke and premise of the movie is basically that this guy who Brosnan plays is no longer hardcore, he's basically a self-appointed failure in the middle of a nervous breakdown. In the end the Kinnear character is more hardcore than he is, and that's a great premise I think to hang the movie around since it's ultimately only a 90 minute piece of fluff anyway. Nobody should go away hoping for any kind of revelations on the human spirit, and although I liked Hope Davis in the role I thought the movie could have done with maybe a bit less dramatic scenes with her and Kinnear. It's great to see how well Kinnear can handle drama though, and the other major reversal inherent in the premise is to have Brosnan play the goofier character and have Kinnear play the more serious role. I think a lot of times when you reverse expectations that way you get a very fresh movie with fresh performances.It'll never be known as a classic or anything, but this is going to be one of those movies that gets brought up at a party or in a bar and maybe the 2 or 3 people who did see it will all chime in with "hey, yeah that was pretty good wasn't it?". Not quite "the greatest cocktail party story you ever heard" but not too far either. I like the fact that Julian, the Brosnan character, was quite the prick and the movie didn't go out of its way to make him likable. It's interesting to see a charming actor like Brosnan basically tread water and try to pull through a character like that and make him appealing in some way.