2005: Matador, The (96th)

What else happened this year? Hurricane Katrina hit. That was a thing.

What is the plot - in one sentence? We follow a drug addicted assassin as he recruits a new, straight-laced friend, to help him overcome performance failure and get back to killing

I don't have time, just spoil it for me? He is helped by his new friend and assassinates what turns out to be his boss, so that he doesn’t have to take any more jobs. Hooray!

What is the meaning of the title? There’s a bit of bull-fighting that they go to (in Mexico), and Piers suggests that he appreciates the matador’s skillset. The bull fighting is all CGI, they tell us at the end, yeah, the CGI hasn’t aged well. 

 

Greg and Piers enjoy a tense laugh in the men's room.

Anything that's not aged well? Does a woman get slapped around? No, amazingly, we do get to see Piers Brosnan saunter around in cowboy boots and underpants, and he’s aged very well for an alcoholic with nerve problems.

Any thoughts?This is largely a black comedy, and it was pretty funny. I’ll keep it at that.

We’re meant to think that Greg Kinnear hired Piers to kill a business rival, but it turns out at the end that he talked him down, and uses that information to get his friend to help him.

Would you recommend this? There’s a weird thing where I wasn’t expecting anything from this movie, so I was surprised by it being fun and funny. If I recommend it to you, you’d expect it to be better than it is, so it would be overhyped, despite it being the same movie. This is one of those movies.

This was fine, I’d watch it again.

Final thoughts? This is a movie with a very obvious example of ‘dead child’ syndrome, Greg Kinnear and his wife are mourning the loss of their child, but it adds nothing whatsoever to the story.

I wonder if assassins really get the yips. I don’t really have much to say about this.Oh, Adam Scott was in this, as the business partner. That's it.

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