Should I feel a little bit guilty for having enjoyed this film? It's not the greatest action movie around, it lacks special effects and car chases. Credibility is not really the strong argument of the story. We are asked and we end by sympathizing with a couple of guys who do very bad things. And yet The Matador produced and acted by Pierce Brosnan worked for me better than I expected. Now I need to find why.Julian Noble is a hit-man and the most irregular guy on Earth. He kills people for money, has no home or even a fixed address, getting drunk and buying sex seem to be his only pass-times. Danny Wright is the most regular guy on Earth, a businessman from Denver, he does have a house and a beautiful and loving wife, but his professional and personal life seems to have entered in an unavoidable dead-end. Their getting together is an improbable event, the only less probable one being them becoming friends. Yet, this is exactly what happens in The Matador and their friendship takes a path that is unpredictable and hidden from the viewer or the viewer is sent to wrong tracks for much of the time.So why does the story written and directed by Richard Shepard work? One of the reasons is that each of the three characters has a lot to identify with. Of course, hard to resonate with the professional killer day job, but certainly easy to feel compassion for working permanently under pressure, getting tired of the accelerated (corporate!) rhythm, not getting a listening ear from your boss. With the other two characters (Danny and his wife) it's much easier, they are us, but here comes the second principal reason of my liking this film - acting. Both Greg Kinnear and Hope Davis not only give fine performances, but they are sincere and feel the roles. They are us, and make us understand that. Pierce Brosnan is nothing but perfect, this is the best role I saw him in, his switching acts from the cool killer to the lost kid in town, from cynicism to vulnerability are masterful and the comical register fits him as well as the James Bond jacket. Last reason, the film carries some problematic or bad ideas (friendship as a good excuse for killing for example) but also a great one - beware of what regular people can do when you push them with the back to the wall! Eventually the combination of these three arguments wins.

In a way this movie is being like the crime version of "Lost in Translation". It uses a very similar concept of a burned out, aging hit-man meeting an average Joe, in a foreign country and decide on spending their time together. It even somewhat uses the same approach of mixing comedy with serious drama. Not saying that this is a bad thing, or something that really matters but it was just a fun observation I made.The movie is still good and original to watch on its own though luckily. It's a movie with some hits and misses in it but overall I still consider it to be an above average one.The movie does feel a bit awkward at times with its comedy, that just seems to come and go within this movie. The one moment it's a real goofy movie to watch, while the movie mostly is still made in a very serious fashion and tone. But still it helps to make the movie pleasant and easy to watch. And this is a good thing, since it isn't exactly the movie its story that is being its strongest aspect.It's as if the director himself also didn't had really enough confidence in his own written script and tried to spice things up more with an over-stylized, hip, modern style that instead more often came across as too desperate and too wannabee. All of the sings of an inexperienced director but Richard Shepard actually isn't that inexperienced at all, which makes it odd that he really made some wrong choices at times with this movie.One thing that bugged me for instance was that we never saw the Pierce Brosnan character kill anybody in this movie, even though he does supposedly kill a whole bunch of people. Again, to me this was a sign that the director just didn't had enough confidence in either his script and actors. He must had been worried that we wouldn't care or sympathize with the Pierce Brosnan character if we saw him killing people in cold blood.And there absolutely was no reason for that, since it really are the actors that pull this movie and its story through. They do such a good job and I think I have to admit that I have never seen Pierce Brosnan act so well within a movie. He's very convincing and they also did a great job at aging him up. Yes, he of course was already in his 50's but he seems to be a guy that simply ever refuses to start to look old, until this movie came along, in which he really looks like a burned out guy, at an age when everything seems to go downhill for him from now on.So it really is far from a perfect movie, or a must-see but it's a good movie to watch if you happen to catch it on TV when nothing else is on. You probably won't regret watching it, despite of all of its flaws and weaknesses (such as also its editing, which I forgot to mention before) that are in it.7/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

Pierce Brosnan should have got an award for his wickedly humorous performance as a sleazy yet humanly flawed hit-man. You can see all the Royal Shakespeare Company credentials from his early theatre days, before Hollywood hired him to perform - very profitably - for audiences of morons. Many, many such morons, who had him nicely stereotyped where they liked him, have tried to sink a film that embarrasses them with the sight of an assassin who is just like Bond, but stripped of the fake glamour that made his vulgarity and wickedness acceptable to their shallow morality - all rote observance without real soul as that hypocrite's comforter is. No doubt more could have been done to intensify the sinister side of the scenario - but then who can reasonably complain at having a grown-up comedy, at least, instead of yet another disgustingly stupid teen flick?Afer all, it is made perfectly clear (BIG SPOILER AHEAD) in the late flashback to the scene where it turns out we had wrongly assumed - just as Bean the wife had been lied to about this incident - that Danny righteously refused to open the door to Julian, whereas in fact the scene plays out to its conclusion only when we see that the distinctly ignoble Noble actually has qualms - if not exactly scruples! - about corrupting an only decent-ish man! This, of course, is just the sort of shifting moral perspective that makes our poor precious little PC darlings quite queasy, and sends them scurrying out of the cinema as fast as their little legs can carry them.It is making a creative jest of what some folk only see in absolutist and black-and-white terms that is so offensive to them. A more sinister, less likable assassin would have left them comfortable and untroubled - because he would not have touched them. The only honest good people are the relatively good, like Danny and Bean, who are at least honest enough to admit they have a weakness for this terrible man and his easy, sleazy good-natured dirty glamour, yet still preserve their own simple amiable decency. What saves this often horribly naive couple is that they have retained enough human curiosity and empathy to avoid the meaningless safety of that same prescriptive Political Correctness that can find little better to criticise this film for than showing a bullfight. The furore this caused entirely missed the point of a film that, after all, was called 'The Matador' precisely in order to show how strangely life-affirming the contemplation of Death can actually be! Indeed, such purging of our darker instincts and desires was no less than a religious act of moral salvation - 'catharsis' - in the ancient Greek tragedy.This is no Greek tragedy, of course, but the film does show a real awareness of the dark side, and simply chooses instead to tread delicately but deliberately around its sinister subject, with perhaps something of the wit of the Picador on his balletic feet, a spectacle which our metaphorical Matador commends to his new friend's attention.This is (as it were) the dying bull's gift to the man he recognises as his better. An undemonstratively brilliant little film, then, and as light and sharp as a short story or a Picador's lance, and beautifully weighted to the sad but dignified end it is directed towards.

Brosnan's performance of a lifetime. Utterly compelling, beautiful and tragic. If only more people would give this movie a chance. Comparable to Grosse Point Blank on many levels it contains the same multiple layers of character detail and deeper message behind the surface detail, minus the action. The movie's title may have contributed to its relative quiet box office performance, acting more as a metaphor for the movie's protagonist than an exciting description of the splendid script. Real, honest performances grace this movie and even gives us an ending John Hughes would have been proud of in his 80's pomp. I would have loved to have seen Brosnan receive the big accolades for his performance, and to be honest it exasperates me to know it was largely ignored by the big awards, a best supporting actor nomination at the Golden Globes the only real acknowledgement.