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Wild target

Blurring the boundaries
WILD TARGET
Director: Jonathan Lyn
Cert. 12A

This remake of early 1990s French comedy Cible Žmouvante follows ageing assassin Victor Maynard (Bill Nighy), on his search through London for an apprentice. He gets mixed up in adventure with the deceptively bumbling con artist Rose (Emily Blunt), and laid back street urchin Tony (Rupert Grint).

It’s a sunny, vaguely likeable and low-key affair, with much of the humour unsurprisingly coming from cheap, risquŽ jokes and from making light of violent situations. If presented carefully, sinful content in films can sometimes help to frame a larger moral truth; that is sadly not the case here though, and it seems irresponsible of the filmmakers for example to cast Rupert Grint, something of a role model for many fans of his work in the Harry Potter films, as a character who goes unchallenged for smoking marijuana. Especially for a film aimed at young audiences, the line between right and wrong is disturbingly blurred.

Flat ending

Wild Target is half entertaining, until you remember that you have a brain. The script is painfully lazy: important characters are abandoned without closure, loose ends go ignored and the plot is riddled with countless contrived ‘twists’. The ending falls flatter than a steamrollered pancake; a clever finale might have been able to redeem the film’s seriously flawed screenplay but, alas, a lame gag (unsafe for cat lovers!) is all that precedes the end credits.

Some fun can be derived from the deliberate ‘Britishness’ of it all, and the story never gets too bogged down by exposition which allows the slapstick action to flow fairly smoothly. The music is nothing special, merely helping to keep the mood steadily upbeat.

Murky morals

You’d be forgiven for leaving the cinema with a faint smile on your face, but, at the end of the day, however warm the talented actors manage to make things feel, the plot is still weak and the morals murky. Unless it’s a film like next month’s Toy Story 3 under the microscope, then it is almost always a sign of poorly developed characters when most of them don’t even have last names!

Peter D. Marsay,
filmmaker/writer