Assassin(s) (1997) - film review

An ageing professional killer, Wagner, is looking for someone to take over his job.  He recruits a pretty inept thief, Max, as an apprentice, but Max seems to have little appetite for his new job.  However, the same cannot be said for Max’s teenage friend, Mehdi...

This is a film that plays on Mathieu Kassovitz’s strengths as both an actor and a director.  As an actor, he is well-suited to play the half-hearted, rather feckless criminal, a tragic-comic role that Kassovitz seems to excel in.

In the director’s seat, Kassovitz creates a film that is energetic, vibrant, dramatic, and visually very impressive.  The three lead characters are well-used, with some fine performances, particularly from veteran actor Michel Serrault who acts out the paradoxes of his day job as a professional killer with great conviction and sincerity.

The film can be interpreted, plausibly, as an analysis of the effect to which television alters our sense of reality and our view of normality.  In virtually every indoor scene there is a full-size television set in a position of prominence, blaring away, often drowning out the dialogue of the actors.  When the film begins, the awfulness of the acts which are being enacted by the characters Max and Wagner contrasts vividly with the sanitised violence of a gameshow and a nature program on the television.  Then, as the film develops, the degree of violence on the small screen and in the real world seem to equalise, until, in the last part of the film the violence on the television (and particularly the computer games) far exceeds the gruesome reality being played out by Wagner’s new recruit.  We have, disturbingly, become enured to violence to such an extent that when we see the most awful act of all, relayed on a news bulletin at the end of the film, there is no sense of shock at all.  Indeed, that is the most worrying aspect of the film.  Is this, as Kassovitz seems to be suggesting, what television is doing to us: conditioning us to accept extreme violence as banal and perfectly natural?

Whilst not quite as impressive as Kassovitz’s earlier film, La Haine, which had much greater focus and impact, Assassin(s) is nonetheless a thought-provoking and impressive film.  It is certainly a very uncomfortable piece of cinema and its entertainment value is all but eroded by the amount of violence that the viewer is subjected to.  However, in contrast to many other films (primarily latterday Hollywood blockbusters) the violence in this film is not intended to entertain.  It is strange, that as a result, Assassin(s) appears more disturbing than most films of that genre, where the violence is of a far more explicit and rampant nature.  By shocking us, Assassin(s) proves its point, and we should be worried.

© James Travers 1999

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