We might have a Sylvester Stallone movie back to back in the coming weeks. For the first film, we feature Assassins.
Stallone plays Robert Rath, the number one hitman for hire or an assassin who's contemplating of retiring. He's trying to round up just a few hits before he does when suddenly his assignments were being stolen by an up and coming assassin in Miguel Bain (played by Antonio Banderas). A sociopath, he wants to kill Rath in order for him to be touted as the number one assassin.
Meanwhile another assignment came up, and this time it was for a computer hacker in Electra (played by Julianne Moore). All Rath has to do is kill the hacker Electra and recover data in a disk. Electra had buyers for this disk and they arrange for an exchange at a hotel room. Bain was the first on the scene and kills off the buyers. While Rath was able to trace Electra and he spirits him out of the hotel to safety.
Rath managed to arrange a fee for the disk he asked from Elektra and all he got was a suitcase bomb. It was clear that his contractor tried to kill him. He still had the disk so he arranges for another exchange with contractor who tried to kill im, with an higher amount in fees. Money should be wired to a bank, the same bank where Rath killed another assassin in Nikolai. Nikolai was number one then, so when Rath killed him, he became number one.
Now the contractor sends Bain a new target, this time it was Rath who was being targetted as a mark. Bain positioned himself on top of an adjacent abandoned building hoping to kill Rath while going out of the bank. It didn't turn out well for Bain when suddenly Nikolai appeared to Rath. All this time Rath thought he killed Nikolai, who then explained to him that he was wearing a bulletproof vest that day. Unfortunate for Nikolai, Bain wasn't as dead as we presumed, and he was able to help Rath kill Nikolai.
Even after joining forces Bain still wants to kill Rath to be called number one however in his attempt to do so in the end, Rath got wind of this and killed him instead.
Sylvester Stallone was perfect in this role with a gun. A little downplay from his Rambo movies, we still love him even if he carries a smaller weapon this time around. Except maybe for his mumblings, he carried this role to a T. To complete the yin and the yang, we got a young Antonio Banderas who truly shines as the crazy younger than Rath, Miguel Bain. His curly locks together with that laugh, he is the perfect villain for our morally straight hero (?). Given a choice between them, we liked Banderas more than Stallone here. Both characters were given their own time to shine and it just sucks that Bain was killed in the end, a sequel to this could have been nice, if he was alive, maybe we can have a franchise.
Julianne Moore as Electra also gave a solid performance. Although she was not credible to be a hacker, she's too beautiful for that, we still adored her. We first saw her here (although she had a number of films prior) and we knew right there and then she would have a number of films thereafter. She's a steady performer and this is a good film for her appear in.
Unfortunately this movie is not on Netflix and not available on YouTube so you better find another way of watching this film (wink).
