As most moviegoers have noticed, the last few years have seen Bruce Willis appear in a seemingly endless string of low-grade VOD movies in which he would turn up in a handful of scenes in exchange for a big payday. For a time, I would dutifully watch and review these films, more out of curiosity than anything else, but after a while, even I could no longer handle the sorry spectacle and I gave up on them. Last year, of course, an explanation of sorts finally arrived when it was announced that Willis was suffering from dementia and was evidently doing these films as a way of making as much money as possible before his worsening condition made it impossible to work. Somehow, that news made the sorry lot of films that continued to emerge seem even worse than they were, especially when combined with reports that Willis’s handlers were exploiting him by continuing to have him work even when it was clearly apparent that he was in no condition to do so.
His latest project, Assassin, is reported to be his final performance and because of that, I decided that I would take a look at this one after all. Admittedly, I had no particular confidence that it would be good or even passable but as someone who was there to see Willis in his first big-screen starring roles in the Blake Edwards’ epics Blind Date and Sunset and caught a sneak preview of a little thing called Die Hard, I figured that I should be there at the end as well. Who knows—maybe the film might even bless us with a brief and final glimmer of what it was that made him such an undeniably compelling screen presence in the first place? To cut to the chase, it doesn’t—Assassin is little more than instantly forgettable and mostly inane junk from start to finish and the closest thing to a good point that it contains is the fact that it will hopefully be the last time that we have to endure the sight of a visibly-in-decline Willis be shoved into garbage far beneath his talents.
Willis plays Valmora, a secret agent who, along with Olivia (Fernanda Andrade), is running a clandestine spy program that allows agents, with the aid of a tiny high-tech robot worm, to take over the bodies of unsuspecting people, do their dirty work (you saw the title) and escape with the host having no idea of what has happened. (The fates of those unsuspecting and technically innocent hosts is, of course, never dwelled upon.) One member of the program, Sebastian (Mustafa Shaki), was detected by his target, international bad guy Adrian (Dominic Purcell), and had his worm yanked out, giving Adrian the technology and landing Sebastian into a coma. His wife, Alexa (Nomzamo Mbatha), a fellow soldier who was under the impression that her husband was an ordinary drone pilot, is recruited by Valmora to go through the process as well, inhabiting the body of artist Mali (Andy Allo) to take out Adrian, retrieve the stolen tech and, possibly, find a way to revive Sebastian.
While the results may not be quite as dire as some of Willis’s other VOD escapades (at least of the ones that I have seen), Assassin is ultimately as formulaic and forgettable as its title. The conceit of people jumping into the bodies of unsuspecting people is not a particularly fresh concept and director/co-writer Jesse Atlas does nothing to give it a fresh twist. Clearly working with a limited budget, Atlas takes a low-fi approach to the fantastical elements throughout that may have been a good idea in theory but comes across as supremely chintzy in practice—the mechanism that allows the users to access other bodies is literally a bathtub filled with ice hooked up to a couple of machines clearly scavenged from a recycling bin. As for the story, it contains no recognizable traces of suspense, wonder or curiosity, it refuses to grapple or even acknowledge the thorny ethical complications of the technology at its center and it all builds to a shocking twist that pretty much anyone still watching will have figured out long before it is deployed.
As for Willis, the news is just about as depressing. He only makes a few sporadic appearances throughout and even if you were unaware of his condition, his presence here would leave thinking that there was something indeed wrong with him. He delivers his lines in a voice that suggests that he is merely saying words that he has been asked to say without having any idea of what they might mean to characters that he never quite seems to connect to in any way. In a valiant attempt to cover up for Willis’s troubles, Atlas breaks up most of the scenes he is in so that he is only on screen by himself, even when others are in the scene, when delivering his few lines—even shooting him in shadows at some points, presumably to make it easier to dub in his dialogue later. There is, in fact, only one scene that I can recall in which he is clearly playing against another actor for more than a few seconds and, despite his best efforts, the result is pretty excruciating, all the more so because it proves to be his final scene.
If Assassin were just another cheapo VOD craptacular, my guess is that no one would pay it any mind and it would fade into the obscurity that it so richly deserves. Alas, since it does appear to be Willis’s cinematic swan song, it will gain a place in the annals of cinema history as a result. My guess is that it will also receive a little more attention than usual from fans of Willis’s past accomplishment who want to pay tribute to the man and his work. I understand that sentiment—that is why I sat down to watch and review the thing in the first place—but you would be honoring his legacy in a far more meaningful way by going back and rewatching any number of the stone-cold classics in his filmography and giving this junk the pass that his advisors should have done in the first place.