Film

Assassins (1995)

Director: Richard Donner

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

An unusually serious, almost sombre thriller from the versatile action producer Joel Silver in which Stallone's a jaded assassin haunted by the past but unable to face the future. As Robert Rath, he gives his best performance for some time, abandoning the self-mockery of Demolition Man and the risible muscle-flexing of The Specialist in favour of a more contained stillness. If only director Donner had inspired Banderas with the same confidence in this essentially generic, but involving scenario; as Miguel Bain, however, an upstart obsessed with inheriting Rath's position as the world's number-one assassin, he's horribly embarrassing, acting throughout like a St Vitus Dance sufferer on amphetamines. Plotwise, things are straightforward. Julianne Moore has unwittingly acquired a computer disk containing dangerously incriminating information, Stallone's hired to kill her, but is having a mid-life career crisis, the bad guys and Interpol are slaughtering everything that moves, and Banderas is the joker in the pack. Between the hits, car chases and gunfire, there are numerous quiet scenes in darkened rooms in which Sly and Moore discover an affinity in their loneliness.

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