Blurring the boundaries
WILD TARGET Director: Jonathan Lyn Cert. 12A
This remake of early 1990s French comedy Cible émouvante 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, risqué 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.
