"Requiem For A Killer" is a lackluster star vehicle for the beautiful, ethereal French actress Melanie Laurent, who had just gained international fame by having a major role in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglorious Basterds". She is holding a gun on the cover, but she never once holds, much less fires, a gun in the movie; in fact, there is hardly any action in the movie at all. There is a little suspense, and a mystery whose solution is revealed to the viewers long before the on-screen characters, and some existential angst, and some opera singing (for which Laurent is obviously dubbed), and some sightseeing....but not enough of anything to really keep any type of audience happy. It's a handsome production, and Laurent is stunning, but if you're looking for a good female-assassin movie, this isn't it. ** out of 4.

Right from the first scene, not one decision by any character made any sense. Instead of creating suspense, each new plot twist forced me to ask: "Why would anyone do that?" It felt like a bad Agatha Christie novel, where every character had the common sense of Inspector Clouseau.Worse still, the characters didn't seem motivated by love, duty, guilt, fear, self-preservation, their careers or anything (except maybe ennui). So when their laughably silly plans go awry, the characters don't seem to really care, and neither does the audience. When a major reveal happens in a murder movie, one kind of expects a stronger reaction from the main character than saying, "I'm too old for this." So by the end of the movie, I didn't really care what happened to any of them. This gets two stars rather than one because some of the actors are good looking.

i don't if the french movie producers got different logic from other countries' movie producers. i don't even understand how this slow crawling screenplay would be approved into real production. the casting was not bad, but the scenario, the plot, the storyline of this screenplay were just too boring to the extreme. i wonder if the production team had felt asleep during the shooting. this is a absolutely deadbeat french movie, tried so hard to have some classy touch with sublime religious music and songs praising the lord while murders were executed behind the scene. what we got is a beautiful french actress mimic a singer with beautiful costumes and make-up. the dialog boring, the acting deadbeat, the directing Zzzzz snooze off the director's chair, all the production team couldn't help yawning all the time with sleepy tears from yawning. the murders, the conspiracy, the cat, the allergy, the sparkling wine or champagne, the heavenly songs.... so what it was all about? I COULDN'T CARE LESS, because i am more interested in watching the ants doing their daily chores along my backyard's patio concrete slabs.

The deadliest hit-man in Europe is actually a woman and sings contralto. The toughest secret agent detailed to stop her is a guitar virtuoso. If you can swallow that and watch the rest of it as a straight thriller, you have a mental age of four. Tops.In fact, this is a hilarious send-up of three different genres all at once: Hitchcockian cat-and-mouse thriller, Agatha Christie whodunnit and Italian giallo. Perhaps the director (quite rightly) doubted that the producers would allow him to make three different films in this vein, so he lumped all three together. Which I suppose makes the whole even funnier.The script goes out of its way to invent the most bizarre situations and then sabotage them in the most outlandish ways possible. Witness the outrageous murder method employed in the opening sequence, or the episode where the killer uses poison to fulfill her contract, only to realise she is a breath away from having a mass murder on her CV. All characters behave like children in a playground sand pit, set to gorgeous strands of Handel's Messiah. And the film looks ravishing, too, in the best 70s fashion, both outdoors and in.Bound to be a flop at the box-office (way, way too tongue-in-cheek for the popcorn-munching crowd), but should become a cult classic if there's any justice in this world.