These 10 assassin movies are killer
One way in which movies are better than real life? You can root for the bad guys with a clean conscience.
In the movies, hitmen and assassins are uncommonly awesome. Instead of the gangsters and psychopaths you’re likely to encounter in the real world, you get eloquent philosophers with unshakable moral codes and flawless aim.
Action thriller “American Assassin” – in theaters now – may join the ranks of these 10 killer (literally) movie assassins.
10. ‘Grosse Pointe Blank’ (1997)
A high-school reunion is enough to get anyone re-evaluating their life decisions — whom they married or didn’t, their looks, their line of work — and ponder the person they could have been instead. That goes double for suburban Midwesterners who grow up to be hitmen. Professional assassin Martin Q. Blank (John Cusack), in the midst of a moral crisis, decides to attend his 10-year high-school reunion in Grosse Pointe, Mich., where he reconnects with his high-school sweetheart (Minnie Driver). Quirk is an odd quality to bestow on a contract killer, but this oddball comedy is brimming with it.
9. ‘The Assassin’ (2015)
It sounds like a classic martial-arts action film: A betrayed female assassin returns home to exact justice, and revenge, on her once-betrothed in the midst of political turmoil in Tang Dynasty-era China. But art-house director Hsiao-Hsien Hou has reimagined those classic elements. Filmed with a gorgeous stillness, “The Assassin” lingers on silence, unfurling like an unhurried flower in bloom, disrupted only by moments of striking combat.
8. ‘Looper’ (2012)
This pulpy sci-fi thriller envisions a future in which criminal organizations use time travel to send their marks into the past to be dispatched by assassins called “loopers.” Does it make sense? No. Does it matter? Double no. Because it’s cool. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Joe, a looper who meets his older self (Bruce Willis) at the wrong end of his blunderbuss. As with any film that employs time-travelbased shenanigans, the less you ponder the paradoxes, the better. But chances are you’ll be too entranced by the creepy combo of makeup, prosthetics and CGI employed to make Gordon-Levitt look more like Willis to hunt for logical fallacies.
7. ‘In Bruges’ (2008)
When a job goes grievously wrong, the boss doesn’t lose his cool; instead he sends his men (Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson) on a mini holiday to Bruges, Belgium, a fairytale town of gingerbread houses and cobblestone streets that couldn’t serve as a more unlikely background to a comedy this black. If it’s wrong to laugh so hard when there’s a dead kid, a grief-stricken murderer and a drug-addled dwarf involved, then who the hell wants to be right?
6. ‘John Wick’ and ‘John Wick: Chapter 2’ (2014 and 2017)
So you’ve got this world-renowned, universally feared legend of an assassin who’s hung up his gun for domestic life and his wife has just died. What is pretty much the dumbest thing you can do? Oh yeah, kill his dog – the dog his dead wife gave him. That’s the catalyst that sets off the bonebreaking vengeance thrill ride that so far spans two delirious films set in a world with a secret society of assassins. The world-building is delicious, but it’s all just window dressing for the best stunt work of Keanu Reeves’ career.
5. ‘Kill Bill,’ Volumes 1 and 2 (2003-2004)
“Vol. 1” is all wanton violence and vengeful bloodshed after the Bride (Uma Thurman) wakes from a four-year coma her former lover Bill (David Carradine) put her in with a bullet to the head on her wedding day. It’s the fun one. But Vol. 2 is the heart. Director Quentin Tarantino skips back in time to show how the Bride got those mad katana skills under the tutelage of Pai Mei (Gordon Liu), a martial-arts master who first ridicules then grows to respect his determined pupil. If not for him, the film’s finale wouldn’t hit the audience’s emotions as hard as a five-pointpalm exploding-heart technique.
4. ‘No Country for Old Men’ (2007)
Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) was inducted to the hall of infamy the second the credits started to roll on this best-picturewinning Coen brothers film. Chigurh was nightmared into existence in the pages of a Cormac McCarthy novel — one that doesn’t feature any dead babies, making it one of his more chipper books! — as a psychopathic hit man hired to recover a stolen satchel of drug money from a deal gone wrong. And if there’s anything worse than a crazy man armed with a cattle gun, it’s one with a twisted moral code and a mod Prince Valiant haircut.
3. ‘The Killer’ (1989)
Contract killers, like hookers, often have hearts of gold – at least in the movies. Perhaps none more so than Chow Yunfat’s guilt-ridden assassin, whose errant bullet renders an innocent lounge singer nearly blind and in desperate need of a corneal transplant. He decides to take that alwaysill-fated final job to pay for her surgery and captures the attention of an obsessive young detective. The Hong Kong action flick was Woo’s introduction to the Hollywood Elite that would riff on, borrow from and outright steal his style through the ’90s, down to symbolic flights of white doves. Imitation, they say, is the sincerest form of flattery.
2. ‘Le Samourai’ (1967)
French director JeanPierre Melville mastered the cinema of trenchcoated cool in this stylish marriage of American gangster cinema, French pop culture and Japanese codes of lone-warrior honor. The effortlessly chic Alain Delon plays Jef Costello, a spartan hitman double-crossed and in a fix. “There is no greater solitude than that of the samurai,” a title screen at the start of the film reads, “unless it is of the tiger in the jungle.” Melville, as always, makes such frosty solitude irresistibly sexy.
1. ‘Leon: The Professional’ (1994)
Jean Reno stars as Leon, loner hitman, while Natalie Portman (in her stunning film debut) plays Mathilda, a 12-yearold girl whose family is murdered by corrupt DEA agents. Leon takes the orphaned girl in, teaching her the ropes of his trade, as an unhinged Gary Oldman guns for the pair. It’s sweet, in the twisted, vaguely uncomfortable way love stories between hitmen and 12year-old girls tend to be.