They warned us it would happen. They warned us that insidious Hollywood product would overcome indigenous films, sort of like rabbits being introduced to Australia. The Memory of a Killer, the latest import from Belgium, and winner of many Belgian awards and possibly waffles, is a perfect example of rote Hollywood fare being produced in a different language.
The premise of the film is intriguing – a hitman with Alzheimers is convinced to take One Last Job. When he discovers that one of the victims on his list is a 12 year old girl, he tries to quit. When his employers make a pretty solid effort to kill him, he turns on them.
There are two major problems here – one is that the idea of a hitman with Alzheimers seems to be just getting lip service in the film. It’s used as a MacGuffin, more or less, just a hook.
But the film’s real problem is that it spends so much of its running time not with the deteriorating killer but with two cops on his trail. One cop is silly and an expert marksman, the other is model beautiful with a haunting past of loss. I feel like this shit wouldn’t even fly on a TV show anymore.
What really got on my nerves about the cop element is that apparently the Belgian police work just like the American police – ie, they take the law into their own hands, battle with superiors and break all the bureaucratic rules they must to get their bad guy. It’s a boring rehash of every police thriller ever. In fact the original title of the film – The Alzheimer Case – makes it sound like just another episode of Belgian PD, which is fairly fitting.
As routine as the story is, director Erik Van Looy has a nice visual style, if more than a little cribbed from the oeuvre of Fincher et al. What’s unfortunate is that the entire film is saturated in blue to the point where it looks like it was shot through a filter of Tidy Bowl.
The standout of the film is actor Jan Declair, playing the aging assassin. He’s a great mixture of decrepit physical menace and tortured mind. The plot doesn’t give his character many opportunities to be actually affected by his reduced mental facilities, so Declair has to get it all across with his eyes. He’s great.
In the end, The Memory of a Killer isn’t a bad film, just an overly familiar one. It’s also too long – with a solid 30 minutes cut out of its two hour running time, this would be a leaner, more propulsive thriller. At its current length it’s bloated, and makes the mistake of climaxing twenty minutes early and walking us through the kind of wrap up events that should have been handled in a text block at the end.
Usually the idea of remaking a recent foreign film makes me want to slap Hollywood silly, but The Memory of a Killer feels so much like an audition tape for a Hollywood career that the thought comes naturally. Actually, the role of the old hitman is a great one for Robert DeNiro – he can shed some of his broad comedy roles and put his recent constant look of befuddlement to good use.
6 out of 10