ASSASSIN CLUB ★
Cert 15
In cinemas now
A pound-shop John Wick, a bargain-basement Bourne and a cut-price Bullet Train.
The Assassin Club is all these things and a whole lot less. Yet scandalously, for the next week at least, it’s available for the price of a standard ticket. Shrinkflation has reached the cinemas.
Camille Delamarre (director of the equally dire Brick Mansions), sends Henry Golding’s monotone hitman on a whirlwind mission through Europe for a series of awful shaky-camera fights with rival assassins.
Sam Neill (who really should know better) plays his handler. He also agreed to appear in the most shoddily-photoshopped snaps I’ve ever seen in a professional motion picture.
The laughable photo is supposed to be proof of a shared past with a group of mercenaries fighting the Middle East. As he’s in no way dressed for the desert and his head is about twice the size of the largest soldier’s entire body, it’s just more evidence of the director’s laziness.
Noomi Rapace is doubly terrible as an evil hitwoman with a misjudged Texan drawl who works as the head of an unnamed security agency.
She hides behind her day job by using a pair of specs. It may have worked for Clark Kent, but it seems very short-sighted here.
SUZUME
PG ★★★★ In cinemas now
The coming-of-age drama is given another supernatural twist in the reliably bonkers new feature from Japanese director Makoto Shinkai.
While similar to his previous hits (Your Name and Weathering With You), this story of a girl falling for a three-legged chair, isn’t a typical teenage romance.
Orphan Suzume (pronounced Suz-oom-eh) is cycling to school when she notices a breeze caressing the flowing locks of a handsome young pedestrian.
The lad, called Sota, saves the 16-year-old’s blushes by asking for directions to the nearest ruins.
“I’m looking for a door,” adds the cryptic dreamboat after Suzume points towards an abandoned village.
Turns out the door is a portal to another world. And Sota is a Closer – someone secretly tasked with shutting similar doors whenever giant earthquake-causing worms escape to level a Japanese city.
Intrigued (who wouldn’t be?), Suzume bunks off school to catch up with the lad at the abandoned village. She finds the door first, opens it and allows a mischievous god to escape and take the form of a cute talking kitten.
Before said kitten starts opening other portals across Japan, it turns Sota into a broken child’s chair. Suzume feels the flush of first love as she accompanies the hobbling wooden seat across Japan to stop the cat from releasing more earth-shattering worms.
This probably makes more sense to Japanese kids, who have lived with the trauma of regular earthquake warnings.
But British anime fans will appreciate the stunning animation (the skies are quite something) and Shinkai’s very singular imagination.