This is truly how I welcome the cinema .. A story that has real world characters who have depth and soul... and knowing that it is based on a true story adds even further to the impact.The violence is portrayed in a meaningful manner, it is not glorified with typical Hollywood "drama", here it is cold, quick and without remorse...This is not a film that the mainstream media can love because it portrays the kind of reality that it far too heavy to immediately digest. It is in essence a philosophical/sociological view on the darker side of society.You can't just walk away from this film and forget it...

So I'm a huge watcher of movies. I've probably been going at a run rate of over 300 movies per year for the last several years. I enjoy assassin movies - who doesn't? I had relatively low expectations for this movie given the poor ratings here on IMDb. In general, I find that about 80% of the time I'm directionally aligned with IMDb scores, so I use them as a proxy for what I choose to watch, but sometimes the scores are just totally opposite of what my opinion is and I'm compelled to write a review. I haven't even written that many reviews and I only seem to be motivated enough to write them when I totally disagree with scores. Anyway, JOACK was much better than expected. The acting overall was done well. And while there were certainly aspects of the storyline that could have been better developed (such as the mother-daughter relationship), the overall storyline was quite good. Even if the acting seemed a little too flat sometimes, even for a cold-hearted killer-type movie, the dialogue and timing of the actors was done well, for the most part. I also liked the slight twists and turns of the story over all. In summary, I thought the movie, especially compared to how many bad movies are cranked out every year by Hollywood, was good and worth watching. I score it a solid 8, but give it a 9 here to try to offset the bad score average it has right now.

From the comments that I see on this board,it seems that some people have a problem with anything that is not the "usual" Hollywood fare. This movie kept me on my seat for the duration of it.I could name a few "big budget" movies where after a 20 minutes I felt like getting up and having a beer. "Journal of a contract killer" is quite remarkable,meaning that with a very good story,some unknown actors and the right director you can create something to remember.That's quite an achievement nowadays where just the marketing budget of some truly horrible movies (that you watch once and never again),mostly coming from,where else,the USA,is more than the budget for this movie.Well,enough said,I will recommend this movie to all my friends.

While a cheap production isn't necessarily a bad one, this movie lacks to introduce the characters, actually it doesn't introduce them at all.And so you will have a hard time developing any relationship or care for the actors.While the idea for the movie is a good one, I love movies about contract killers..This production lacks any love, intelligence, fun and joy....and you see it in the movie.The movie is just boring, it's not worth to waste any more words on it.I am not sure why it won two prizes.Maybe the other movies were even worse. Or there were no other movies. Probably that.