Noble nobbling
FILM REVIEW: The Matador
After 23 years of playing glass-smooth good-bad boys like Remington Steele, James Bond and Thomas Crowne, Pierce Brosnan is starting to realise, careering as he is into his mid-50s, that he should act again.
Sure he's played the likes of desperate father Desmond Doyle in Evelyn and jilted sweetheart Joe Brady in The Nephew in recent years, the latter of which I have not seen, but most of his acting career has been devoted, lucratively, to shiny, handsome heroes with loveable flaws. (And here you have to include slight or seemingly ironic variations like Stu Dunmeyer in Mrs Doubtfire, Prof Kessler in Mars Attacks! and Andy Osnard in The Tailor of Panama.) For a couple of well-padded decades he's been little more than a Brioni mannequin with a well-ironed RP accent, a line of quips crafted by the best scripters average sort of money can buy, and a mat of chest hair that could carpet a small Chelsea apartment.
And we know, from not so careful scrutiny of press interviews, that he knows it. But the boy from County Louth was always more than a pretty face.
The Matador finds time, when it's not adhering glue-like to the confines of what might be called a redemptive thriller, to give Brosnan a chance to try on the nicotine-stained pelt of an animal somewhat exotic. Julian Noble, who's clad in a moustache that only enhances his sleazy charm, is a hit-man who travels the globe bumping off the bad, the powerful and the unlucky for a wad of cash. We are taken, if I remember rightly, to Mexico City, Australia, Berlin, Prague. Or they could have all been Vancouver. But in Prague Noble – we are of course compelled to revisit the silent ha-ha of that moniker as we get nearer the credits – has a crisis of confidence. In the past, he has resorted to his usual mood-swingers: booze, drugs and young women who charge by the quarter-hour. But this time none work.
He has already met Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear), an American businessman about to lose a Mexican contract, reeling him in and repulsing him with hard-case jokes and deadpan gutter-talk at the hotel bar. You see, Noble hasn't any friends really. Hard to, with his workload. Plus he actually quite likes being filthy. And boy does he look like fun.
There's a reason for that: the man behind the mo is having fun. Noble is wild, he's unstable, but he's also tremendously likeable: as he says, if nothing else he'll be the best party story you'll ever have. Brosnan throws around coarse, colourful or otherwise unwise lines with the careless relish of a premier-grade rugby team player on furlough. “I hate these Catholic countries. It's all blushy-blushy and no sucky-fucky.” Or to get rid of a prying kid who's introducing his mother, childishly ripostes: “Smell ya; shouldn't have to tell ya.” Yes, despite his very grown-up job and passport stamps, Noble has some way to travel. Perhaps only emotionally stunted types can pull the trigger; I wouldn't know. Brosnan has also discovered a wonderful new visual tic: he throws his head back in a guffaw that shows all his teeth, in the manner that bar sometimes do when they forget the black stuff that occupies them in their quieter moments.
Do enjoy him striding through a hotel lobby in boots and grots, grinning his way through the extended catalogue of sins, but do wonder about the wisdom of showing us his hallucinations: sharks, himself as a child. What are we watching here?
Director Richard Shepard, who has a bit of TV and some forgettable films behind him, soon gets it back on track. But then once he does, he's not sure where to take it. The hard work he's done building the believability of this odd couple slips around on its foundations, and the tight rein he's kept goes a bit slack. When Noble inevitably tracks Wright and his wife down to their home in darkest suburbia, we are left guessing where this will go. Will he pop Danny or his wife Bean (Hope Davis), cuckold her, or just do them both? The presence of doubt in the mind of the viewer is an enviable situation for any director, but it's lost in a fog of good intentions.
Kinnear is fully meant to be the raw prawn, but his calculated blandness (As Good as it Gets, Someone Like You, Nurse Betty) can only take him, and us, so far. For a moment or two, when he's learning of Julian's trade, do we get an excited spark of complicity; otherwise, he's just faking it.
Davis, who always looks like she has more in reserve, though she could be one of those petrol tanks that fools you into thinking you'll get to the station, gets some good lines. Second only to Julian, in fact, but she's played such a minor role by this time that her character's swallowed up by the whirlpools between a mothers' grief, housewife-ish ennui and an outre gun-envy and sudden taste for straight vodka.
After 23 years of playing glass-smooth good-bad boys like Remington Steele, James Bond and Thomas Crowne, Pierce Brosnan is starting to realise, careering as he is into his mid-50s, that he should act again.
Sure he's played the likes of desperate father Desmond Doyle in Evelyn and jilted sweetheart Joe Brady in The Nephew in recent years, the latter of which I have not seen, but most of his acting career has been devoted, lucratively, to shiny, handsome heroes with loveable flaws. (And here you have to include slight or seemingly ironic variations like Stu Dunmeyer in Mrs Doubtfire, Prof Kessler in Mars Attacks! and Andy Osnard in The Tailor of Panama.) For a couple of well-padded decades he's been little more than a Brioni mannequin with a well-ironed RP accent, a line of quips crafted by the best scripters average sort of money can buy, and a mat of chest hair that could carpet a small Chelsea apartment.
And we know, from not so careful scrutiny of press interviews, that he knows it. But the boy from County Louth was always more than a pretty face.
The Matador finds time, when it's not adhering glue-like to the confines of what might be called a redemptive thriller, to give Brosnan a chance to try on the nicotine-stained pelt of an animal somewhat exotic. Julian Noble, who's clad in a moustache that only enhances his sleazy charm, is a hit-man who travels the globe bumping off the bad, the powerful and the unlucky for a wad of cash. We are taken, if I remember rightly, to Mexico City, Australia, Berlin, Prague. Or they could have all been Vancouver. But in Prague Noble – we are of course compelled to revisit the silent ha-ha of that moniker as we get nearer the credits – has a crisis of confidence. In the past, he has resorted to his usual mood-swingers: booze, drugs and young women who charge by the quarter-hour. But this time none work.
He has already met Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear), an American businessman about to lose a Mexican contract, reeling him in and repulsing him with hard-case jokes and deadpan gutter-talk at the hotel bar. You see, Noble hasn't any friends really. Hard to, with his workload. Plus he actually quite likes being filthy. And boy does he look like fun.
There's a reason for that: the man behind the mo is having fun. Noble is wild, he's unstable, but he's also tremendously likeable: as he says, if nothing else he'll be the best party story you'll ever have. Brosnan throws around coarse, colourful or otherwise unwise lines with the careless relish of a premier-grade rugby team player on furlough. “I hate these Catholic countries. It's all blushy-blushy and no sucky-fucky.” Or to get rid of a prying kid who's introducing his mother, childishly ripostes: “Smell ya; shouldn't have to tell ya.” Yes, despite his very grown-up job and passport stamps, Noble has some way to travel. Perhaps only emotionally stunted types can pull the trigger; I wouldn't know. Brosnan has also discovered a wonderful new visual tic: he throws his head back in a guffaw that shows all his teeth, in the manner that bar sometimes do when they forget the black stuff that occupies them in their quieter moments.
Do enjoy him striding through a hotel lobby in boots and grots, grinning his way through the extended catalogue of sins, but do wonder about the wisdom of showing us his hallucinations: sharks, himself as a child. What are we watching here?
Director Richard Shepard, who has a bit of TV and some forgettable films behind him, soon gets it back on track. But then once he does, he's not sure where to take it. The hard work he's done building the believability of this odd couple slips around on its foundations, and the tight rein he's kept goes a bit slack. When Noble inevitably tracks Wright and his wife down to their home in darkest suburbia, we are left guessing where this will go. Will he pop Danny or his wife Bean (Hope Davis), cuckold her, or just do them both? The presence of doubt in the mind of the viewer is an enviable situation for any director, but it's lost in a fog of good intentions.
Kinnear is fully meant to be the raw prawn, but his calculated blandness (As Good as it Gets, Someone Like You, Nurse Betty) can only take him, and us, so far. For a moment or two, when he's learning of Julian's trade, do we get an excited spark of complicity; otherwise, he's just faking it.
Davis, who always looks like she has more in reserve, though she could be one of those petrol tanks that fools you into thinking you'll get to the station, gets some good lines. Second only to Julian, in fact, but she's played such a minor role by this time that her character's swallowed up by the whirlpools between a mothers' grief, housewife-ish ennui and an outre gun-envy and sudden taste for straight vodka.
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