The Killer's Game Movie Review: One of the flagship audiovisual products of this beginning of the year flying the Prime Video flag is The Killer’s Game, the action-comedy with Dave Bautista, Sofia Boutella and Ben Kingsley, which the broadcaster released on January 23, 2025, without even granting the film a passage in theaters.
Whether you agree with it or not, this choice has nevertheless borne fruit, with the film immediately jumping to the top of the top ten of the most viewed titles. The high number of views recorded just a few hours after its release on the platform and the consequent top of the rankings it conquered has therefore proven right those at the top of the company who opted for the direct landing in streaming.
The Killer's Game Movie Analysis:
We’ll have to wait and see how long the film in question will maintain such a ranking once the shock wave of curiosity has worn off, thus leaving room for the paucity of the final result. In the meantime, we would like to warn you about a vision that has very little to offer beyond a few smiles here and there and a handful of fun and entertaining action scenes.
Even those who thought the cast was an added value will have to swallow a bitter pill because none of the interested parties shine enough to raise the bar. Bautista, who showed off his unsuspected acting skills in Blade Runner 2049 and the Dune saga, falls back into mediocrity at the exact moment in which the character assigned to him moves from facts to words, showing all his expressive limits and his inability to enter into interpretative dynamics of a sentimental and emotional nature.
This situation is repeated cyclically in The Killer's Game. The former American wrestler, now an in-demand actor, plays here an elite hitman named Joe Flood who is diagnosed with a terminal illness. He decides to take a drastic decision to leave and leave the business for good, hiring hitmen to kill him.
However, when his girlfriend becomes a target, the man finds himself forced to fight against an army of assassins, protect the woman he loves and try to win her back before it's too late. The starting point and the variation proposed with the terminal illness compared to the usual plot that wants the killer on duty to hang up his weapons after having met love is just a decoy placed there in the plot to delude the viewer that something different and unconventional can materialize on the screen.
Illusions as such are however destined to vanish once the effect has worn off. And that is what will happen more or less at the halfway point of the timeline of a film that in terms of originality will end up, like all similar operations, following paths already widely traveled.
a crazy mayonnaise that mixes action, splatter and over-the-top, foul-mouthed comedy with frankly embarrassing gags
And to think that behind it all there is even a literary work, namely the 1997 novel of the same name by Jay Bonansinga, adapted roughly by Rand Ravich and James Coyne for a transposition to forget. The screenwriting duo is in our opinion the architect of a rewriting process worthy of a court summons, with those few traces of plot on which it was possible to work to give a minimum of depth to the story and the characters that are missing.
In the name of the lowest entertainment, they opt instead, with the consent of director J.J. Perry (debuting after a career as a stunt coordinator, stuntman and a myriad of small roles in films and series), for an all-in on a type of hyper-kinetic action that would like to unsuccessfully replicate the martial and ballistic evolutions of John Wick, adding to these a generous dose of pulp and splatter as in The Brothers Sun and Obliterated. And in the same way, to create a deliberately crazy mayonnaise, they mix it with a comedy that is also over the top, foul-mouthed and with frankly embarrassing gags.
The Killer’s Game: evaluation and conclusion
Jumping to the top of Prime Video’s top ten a few hours after its release, The Killer’s Game was certainly one of the most anticipated titles among the platform’s subscribers. They responded enthusiastically to the film adaptation that debutant J.J. Perry made of Jay Bonansinga’s 1997 novel of the same name, adapted, however, in a rough way by Rand Ravich and James Coyne.
In fact, the screenplay does not exploit the interesting narrative and dramatic ideas provided by the literary work to diversify from the many similar plots in circulation, preferring to follow the appropriate paths of the action-comedy genre based on shootings, chases, hyper-kinetic fights and splatter, seasoned with foul-mouthed humor that can only make you laugh with great effort.