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THE MATADOR
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle so hated being the prisoner of his character Sherlock Holmes that he threw the Great Detective off Reichenbach Falls, only to rescue him a decade later. When Sean Connery finished his 'never again' Bond role, he broke out with the truly catastrophic pretentious garbage of Zardoz. Now it's the turn of Pierce Brosnan (Mars Attacks!) to break out of his shaken-not-stirred dry martini and into a sloppy margarita in this quirky story of a good gunman gone bad.
Julian Noble (Brosnan) is an amoral, rootless, thoroughly sensual assassin ("I want to retire to a beautiful little Greek island, filled with beautiful little Greeks") for whom the world is a series of kills (assigned "through an ad in the International Herald Tribune looking for cat sitters in Bali"), pussies, margaritas, belches, bullfights, and truly tasteless jokes involving midgets, booze, and dicks. In the manner of late-night hotel-bar drinkers the world over, he strikes up a conversation with Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear, Little Miss Sunshine), in Mexico City pitching a big proposal, and blows it twice (I won't tell you the lines; they're both show-stoppers), offending Danny and driving him away.
With his every vulgar cackle Brosnan delights in kicking over the traces of Bond-James-Bond, whether loudly belching or strutting like a pouter pigeon through the hotel lobby garbed in nothing but beer can, black speedo, and black galoshes, straight for the pool. Meanwhile Danny, who when met is manic over an apparent company-saving sale to a big local concern, sinks through the weekend into progressive despair as he sees his redemption vanish in the good-old-Mexican-boys network. Anxious to make good, Julian cajoles Danny into seeing the bullfights, where he confides his secret: he's a contract killer ("facilitator of fatalities … corporate gigs, mostly") – and is met by Danny's guffaw. Whereupon, stung by Darry's dare, he takes up the challenge of murdering a random stranger ("I am a big fan of the 'everybody's gotta pee' theory of assassination") and delivers a modest tutorial on creating the moment:
Danny Wright: [discussing possible escape routes] That door over there, if it weren't locked.
Julian Noble: A Vietnamese girl I once knew had her legs so locked together I couldn't get a whiff of her spring roll. Two drinks, half a Quaalude later, I was at an all-you-can-eat buffet. Every lock can be broken. It's just a matter of will and whether it's worth it.
Jump cut six months to snowy Denver, three in the morning, Julian pounding on the front door of Danny's split-level, opened by a now-revitalized Danny and his coquettish winsome wife Bean (Hope Davis, The Secret Lives of Dentists, Next Stop Wonderland). Julian's having a little crisis of confidence ("I need a break. There's no retirement home for assassins is there? Archery at four, riflery at five?"). Bean finds his sad-sack roguery just a wee bit electric: "Did you bring your gun? May I see it?" and, moments later, "Aren't we fucking cosmopolitan? Having a trained assassin stay overnight. Letting heartbreaking lies roll over us like a summer breeze."
What happens next? Not what you expect.
Indeed, at each plot crisis, The Matador tantalizes us with the flowing red cape of a cliché or trope, only to whisk it away into empty space as we, the blood-blinded viewer, charge where we think the plot is going. The emotional tempo too zags when we expect a zig: expecting pathos, we get farce; ready for tension, we get the whoopee cushion. From first to last this is Pierce's bacchanal of liberation from his black-tie corset, and it's as funny as the joke Julian tells about two guys who walk into a bar, a midget and …