Killing Gunther (2017)

(In French, On TV, July 2022) I had a very, very hard time making it through the first half-hour of Killing Gunther, but you probably won’t. Given the film’s low-profile despite starring no less than Arnold Schwarzenegger making fun of his own tough-guy persona, it first popped up on my radar as a French TV channel in a dubbed version. I don’t usually have trouble watching films dubbed in French—while there are a few actors I’d rather hear with their original voices, I’ve been watching dubbed French films all my life, and the level of quality of these dubs (after decades of expertise accumulated in French-Canadian dubbing companies) is usually top-notch. But Killing Gunther was something else: not only had the film been dubbed very, very loosely (with voices obviously not matching the lip movements), it had also been dubbed in colloquial Québécois, which is almost always a poor choice compared to mid-Atlantic French. It took me a few minutes to understand why, and while the film clicked once I did figure out the reasons behind this choice, it still made the first minutes of the film a bit of a slog. As it turns out, the choice turns out to be defensible once you consider the source material—Killing Gunther is a wild dark comedy in which a killer sets out to assassinate the top man in the business—the elusive titular “Gunther.”  Motivated by the desire to make a name for himself, our assassin protagonist hires a film crew to follow them during the entire adventure. So, yes—Killing Gunther is a found-footage hitman comedy with shaky-cam, naturalistic acting, shoddy obvious editing and reality-TV production values. As such, it makes perfect sense that the dub would be terrible, because that’s the way reality-TV shows are dubbed in French Canada. If it took me too long to figure that out, it’s because I don’t watch reality TV in general, and even less of it dubbed. Once that initial bump in the road behind us, Killing Gunther improved. The pleasantly chaotic plotting (in which no one is safe from sudden death, ruining all plans) is intercut with action scenes often executed as extended one-shots (even if the price to pay for that is substandard special effects, such as the endlessly exploding cars sequence) and comedic interludes in which the tropes of semi-competent hitman suspense films clash with the dumb mundanity of a reality-TV shoot. It does have the advantage of getting crazier by the minute, though:  by the time Schwarzenegger shows up as (who else?) the legendary and over-the-top Gunther, the film has long since jettisoned any attempt at being realistic or even credible. The humour, obviously, is hit and miss—it’s sometimes lame enough to be funny despite itself, which is clearly no substitute for being funny enough to be funny by itself. The result is far too flawed to be good, but it does have a certain propulsive narrative, a few chuckles and an action star having fun sending himself up. Writer-director-producer-star Taran Killam doesn’t quite make everything click, but the result is watchable enough—although I would recommend watching it in the original English.