Assassin Club (15)

Drawing on his military past, assassin-for-hire Morgan permanently silences murderers, rapists and deviants at the behest of his handler Caldwell. Money talks and Caldwell offers Morgan a lucrative final pay day: six separate contracts, each worth one million US dollars. The targets are fellow assassins including Ryder and Yuko, who have been hired to kill Morgan and each other. City streets are transformed into war zones as Morgan adjusts to life on the edge as the hunted.

LondonNet Film Review

Assassin Club (15) Film Review from LondonNet

Hit men and women turn their gun sights on each other in director Camille Delamarre’s lacklustre do-or-die death match, which feigns suspense using composer Alexandre Azaria’s bombastic score and some overly enthusiastic editing of action sequences. Leading man Henry Golding pummels his nice guy image from Crazy Rich Asians to a pulp as an expert marksman, who hopes to escape the killing game and is persuaded to undertake one final job before loved-up retirement. Predictably, there is a sting in the tail to his farewell assignment and Assassin Club makes mountains out of narrative molehills, weaving a tangled web of betrayal that audiences will unravel well before Golding’s harangued hero neatly summarises the double-crosses in a single chunk of exposition…

The most emotionally vulnerable exchanges, which verbalise the inner turmoil of Golding’s assassin, lack the same fluidity and force as bone-crunching fights and chases, which have been a trademark of director Camille Delamarre since his feature directorial debut Brick Mansions and The Transporter Refuelled. A gratuitous shower scene to showcase Golding’s tattooed torso is a cheap move out of the Jason Statham playbook.

Drawing on his military training, elite assassin-for-hire Morgan (Golding) has permanently silenced murderers, rapists and deviants around the world to fulfil contracts brokered by his surrogate father and mentor, Caldwell (Sam Neill). It’s a lonely and soulless existence for Morgan from a base of operations in Rome until he falls in love with schoolteacher Sophie (Daniela Melchior). She is blissfully unaware of his true calling with a sniper’s rifle and is increasingly concerned by the number of bruises and broken bones sustained during so-called business trips.

Morgan ultimately chooses love over loyalty to Caldwell but money talks and the hit man begrudgingly accepts a lucrative farewell pay day: six separate contracts, each worth one million US dollars. The targets are fellow assassins including Ryder (Claudio Del Falco) and Yuko (Sheena Hao), who have received the same set of contracts to terminate each other. City streets across Europe are transformed into war zones as Morgan adjusts to life as the hunted, with a tenacious government agent (Noomi Rapace) and a French police inspector (Jimmy Jean-Louis) on his trail. Sophie becomes potential collateral damage as Morgan roots out a Machiavellian mastermind behind the deadly plot to permanently erase him and his kin.

Assassin Club plays an overly familiar game of cats and mice, planting seeds for future instalments featuring Golding’s gung-ho globe-trotter and an alluring arch-nemesis. That’s one contract Morgan should definitely turn down. Dialogue in Thomas Dunn’s script lands with a heavier thud than the body of a gun-toting bad guy tumbling out of a window and onto the roof of a stationary car. Crash, bang but, sadly, no emotional wallop.

– Sarah Lee