Wild Target – 2010 | 98 mins | Comedy | Colour

Plot Synopsis

Jonathan Lynn’s crime caper ‘Wild Target’ is an extremely haphazard remake of Pierre Salvadori’s humorous French black-comedy ‘Cible Emouvante’. The film begins promisingly with darkly comic momentum as the charming Bill Nighy coolly carries out an assassination and inherits a parrot, but once he encounters kooky Emily Blunt the story soon begins to lose inertia and laughs dry up as the contrived plot and characters deviate into absurdity and implausibility. The sinisterly engaging baddie Rupert Everett also unfortunately steadily fades from view thus neutralising much of the story’s amusing menace.

Victor Maynard (Bill Nighy) is a lonely, debonair middle-aged mummy’s boy who also happens to be a lethally efficient and highly-paid professional hitman. Disillusioned with his profession, his last assignment before retirement is to take out attractive kleptomaniac Rose (Emily Blunt), a small-time con-artist that has sold a fake Rembrandt to art crook and gangster Ferguson (Rupert Everett) for a cool £800,000, and now he’s hired the uptight killer to snuff her out. Unfortunately, Victor finds himself increasingly attracted to ballsy minx Rose, and instead ends up saving her and naïf car-cleaning witness Tony (Rupert Grint) from Ferguson’s henchmen. As the trio flee to Victor’s country house to hide out, the vengeful Ferguson hires younger rival hitman, Hector (Martin Freeman), to dispose of Rose, Victor and Tony.