Martin Owen

(On Cable TV, May 2020) The failure state of an assassin movie is that, in the end, it’s still a movie about people killing people. You can try to dress it up as righteous killings, or slather it in dark comedy, or try to show the personal toll it takes, but in the end… still people killing people. And yet Killers Anonymous, in its ineptness, manages to become so thoroughly repugnant that it almost creates a new category of failure of its own. Everything starts with writer-director Martin Owen, apparently so enamoured of killers as characters that he has them sit down in a support group. Except that it’s not so much a group to help them stop killing as to encourage them to do so. Further twists quickly pile up in a bewildering fashion, taking us to spy thriller territory and then back. So many tropes are piled up on top of each other that the entire thing collapses in a pile of nonsense. But it gets worse, as all of Killers Anonymous is handled with such a pervasive sense of amorality (killers: so cool right now!) that the viewer is liable to feel completely detached from all of it. It certainly doesn’t help that the characters are so abrasive, unlikable, unrelatable and not much worth caring for—the only character for whom I had some sympathy was MyAnna Buring’s Jo, and I strongly suspect that too much of this had to do with her looking cute in a bob haircut and round glasses. The film is so audience-unfriendly that by the time a character is unceremoniously brought into the story by a series of long shots and the audience is asked to care whether she dies or not, we’re done playing along. The directorial flourishes feel more annoying than effective, reflecting my overall mood about the film. Here’s something worth keeping in mind: There have been at least two recent films (Hotel Artemis and Bad Times at the El Royale) with similar stylish presentation of several killers in an isolated place, and both of them were easily better than Killers Anonymous. See it if you don’t believe me, but you will regret it.