ASSASSINS (1995) ** My guess is that everyone involved in this took it way too seriously, except for the two leads. With his bizarre Wile E. Coyote soundtrack noises and coke-fiend nose tugging Antonio Banderas is a brilliant caricature of an assassin. With his mumbling to himself and big ol' doe-eyed dog faces Sylvester Stallone is a caricature of himself acting like an assassin. Don't tell me these guys aren't both good enough to do better if they thought there was any hope. Somewhere along the line they realized that the script wasn't that good, or the surrounding talent lacked something in vision, or fell under the influence of Keith Richards (Old Man of the Mountain assassins style), or something... In any event they made it a much better film than it has any right to be: I can just see them reconvening in the trailer over a few beers laughing at the absurdities that they just got past the straight-man director who was trying to shoot The Godfather out of a sow's ear script. Stallone is an enormous comedic talent as witnessed by his few forays into the field, and his incredible performance in the Saturday Night Live "Butabi Brothers" skit (in which he also proved that a man as large as a skyscraper can move as gracefully as a swan, damn was the man gettin' it!). For a film about guys trying to kill each other there's absolutely no tension, and nothing to offset it in a Murder, She Wrote sense. Instead it's just fun watching the boys play their little games. Just when you think things can't get any more absurd the soundtrack plays middle-aged crusty society lounge Mick Jagger singing Bob Dylan's anthem (written about Brian Jones?) to being young and wild and starving on the streets, Like a Rolling Stone. If only Stallone and Banderas had stopped everything they were doing, and ad-libbed a verse mocking Mick ("Once upon a time, you weren't a cartoon..."). Only then could they have done even better.
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