Nick Stagliano

(On Cable TV, October 2021) In many ways, The Virtuoso is your average small-town assassin film—you know the one: our super-assassin is given one last assignment, and that happens to take place in a very small town where everyone knows everyone, except the lead character. It’s obviously a trap of some sorts, but the film plays along some very familiar tropes—what kind of assassin accepts a brief with such a vague description of his target and an encouragement to investigate? This is the kind of genre fare that fans will like and others won’t. But what saves The Virtuoso from terminal boredom is the addition of a dispassionate voiceover from the main character describing the inner thinking process of a master assassin, the details that go in his planning and the decisions he makes along the way. As a way to bridge the gap between a character-driven narrative and the screen (it’s not adapted from a novel), it’s more interesting than had it not featured the narration. But there’s a limit to what an intriguing narration can do to save a bland, dumb story. Even worse: the film doesn’t even have the decency to end on a positive note, making the entire film feel even more pointless. Anson Mount plays the lead (this is a film in which very few characters are credited as having names), so if the film lured you with the mention of Anthony Hopkins, be forewarned that Hopkins’s involvement in the film is limited to a few barked assignments, a sad Vietnam story and a few more enigmatic pronouncements. There are a few ways in which The Virtuoso could have developed into something slightly more interesting than a low-end genre thriller, but writer-director Nick Stagliano seems content with the least amount of effort. Overhauling the trite plot would have required a lot more work than reworking the narration.