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By Witold Żygulski
The tagline for Richard Shepard's The Matador could read "The Revenge of Pierce Brosnan." The Irish star has gotten even with the producers of the James Bond flicks, who gave up on him as the title character, after four movies, in favor of Daniel Craig. Brosnan has done it in the best possible style by totally mocking his on-screen image as Bond. According to many, he has also played the role of his lifetime in The Matador.
Accustomed to the elegance of 007, the viewer is in for a shock as soon as the film opens. Brosnan's character is a hit man named Julian Noble who wakes up between tumbled sheets, scruffy, unshaven and quite hung over, intimated by an unfinished bottle on the night table and a hardly beautiful (but without a doubt sexually liberated) Latino woman under his blanket. Undisturbed by the situation, Noble reaches for his one-night-stand's handbag, fishes out her nail polish and, with a roguish look on his face, starts applying it to his toe nails.
It does not get any better as the movie progresses-Julian drinks heavily and chain smokes, he almost ostentatiously neglects his physical appearance and tries to drag everybody to bed, high school girls included. What is worse, he is going through a sort of mid-life crisis and, after 22 years on the job, is suffering from hysterical fits and neo-Freudian visions, so much so that he's unable to do new jobs, i.e. shoot on target or even make a professional knife-stab. After another nervous collapse, Julian sobers up at a marketplace in Thailand with his face in donkey feces-enough is enough for fans of the best agent of Her Majesty's most elite special service.
Julian meets his godsend in the form of Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear-As Good As It Gets, Nurse Betty), a businessman having a hard time with his own life. His concerns have nothing to do with killing people, naturally, but they are as acute as his small firm is in a tight spot. These two completely different men meet by chance at a bar in Mexico City and, after initial problems establishing contact (Julian is not exactly an easygoing guy even over a good margarita), Danny succumbs to something like a fascination with his new acquaintance. The consequences of which turn out to be quite dire; six months later, chased by "clients" fed up with their best hit man's "creative angst," Julian shows up in the middle of a snowy night at the home of Danny and his beloved wife Carolyn (Hope Davis-About Schmidt, Arlington Road). The professional killer demands assistance in carrying out the final contract of his career. By doing so, he invokes some secret debt. Until the very end, the viewer does not know what really happened in Mexico. Was it that Julian did a friendly favor and killed Danny's competitor for an important contract, which saved Danny's company? Will Danny accept Julian's proposal for partnership, even if only for a one-off job?
Naturally, The Matador resembles other action comedies about mismatched partners, starting with Billy Wilder's Buddy Buddy from 25 years ago, starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau as the loser and the hit man, respectively. The movie breathes new life into the genre, however, thanks to Brosnan's bold acting, which evokes some inexplicable sympathy for Julian. This film is a nice piece of entertainment, as long as you can tolerate Brosnan's obscenity-riddled dialogue, which is certainly not the Queen's English.
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