The Killer’s Game is a dumb-fun pinball machine, a high-calorie action caper that’s all elbows and B-movie brio, careening between pulp gags and neon guts, knocking you around for 90 minutes, and then blowing you a kiss on the way out the door.
You feel the movie’s plastic sheen and razzle-dazzle pulse in the first shootout, Bright Budapest blues, Dave Bautista’s bulldozer frame plowing through a ballroom like a man who just found out he’s only got three months to live (until, whoops, turns out he doesn’t). This isn’t an assassin thriller interested in poise or poetry; it's a jukebox of “cool” fight moves: axes, motorbikes, strippers with switchblades, and a ballroom shootout that feels like Fortnite staging with Expendables-grade quips.
Director J.J. Perry, late of the post-John Wick action school keeps the camera gliding, if never quite swooning, over the carnage. There’s a Buster Keaton-ish faith in brutal choreography: punches and pratfalls, grenades tossed like spitballs. But where Wick builds a world out of silence and dread, Perry leans into the Saturday morning cartoon version: every villain a Looney Tune special, every squib a punchline. The editing is brisk, beats clipped before they can breathe, which means there’s little actual cool but plenty of movement like trying to catch your breath in a gym with the strobe lights stuck on “rave.”
If there’s any gravity to this party, it’s Dave Bautista. He’s got that lopsided, mournful mug, half prizefighter, half tragic frog, and the movie has a soft spot for letting him lumber through real grown-up feelings (mortality, love, the queasy wish to do right by a girlfriend who can do roundhouse kicks). Sofia Boutella, as Maize, moves like clockwork even when the script gives her soap bubbles, and there’s a flicker of heat in the way her and Bautista’s bodies twine, she’s all angular grace and wound-up nerves, he’s a sack of gravel trying to learn how to waltz. The moment she puts her hand on his scarred cheek, you almost buy the romance in this demolition derby.
And then there’s Terry Crews, rolling on as the world’s most affable hitman, with a strut that’s part Dolemite, part car salesman, making the most of every mug and eyeball roll (thank God they replaced Ice Cube, who would have curdled the whole soufflé). Scott Adkins shows up like a beloved pro wrestler invited to someone else’s cage match, and you get the sense he could eat the set, but Perry gives him just enough room to make you wish the whole movie was his.
If there’s a disappointment here, it’s how the movie confuses escalation with exhilaration, by the halfway mark, we’re getting dumped with waves of cackling Euro-villains and comic-book assassins, but nobody slows down to let the beats pulse. You can spot the John Wick photocopying, secret codes, fancy underworld etiquette, but this is really closer to Polar or a low-rent Crank, elbowing you, trying to make sure you’re having fun (Are we? Sometimes).
Still, there’s pleasure in the sheer variety: a hitman so square he can’t even pull off a bad accent, British strippers with Uzis, Marko Zaror as a Catalan dancing assassin because, dammit, someone has to be. The movie feels assembled from the leftovers of every action script stuck in Hollywood development hell, right down to the “misdiagnosis” twist that lands like a wet bath towel on an already-soaked floor. You feel the screenwriters’ fingerprints smudged all over which is both the charm and the curse.
Watch it right, the movie makes a pact with your teenage self, the one who’d rent a VHS just for the cover art and settle for an explosion every ten minutes. You’re not asked to feel much; you’re asked to giggle and gawk and maybe believe, for a minute, that murder can be both moral and hilarious. If you think too hard, the structure cracks: the love story is pasted from old Jean-Claude Van Damme flicks, the emotional stakes soapy and then instantly discarded.
But at its best, The Killer’s Game is loose, gaudy, and blissfully unimportant, chopped cheese cinema, proud of its trash, inviting you to get sticky and laugh at the blood spray. It’s a party crasher in the John Wick mansion, face full of cake, laughing too loud, and already halfway out the door. You want precision, you’ll miss the breeze. You want a rowdy night out, you could do a lot worse.
It’s silly, throwaway moviemaking, and sometimes that’s the freshest bullet in the chamber.
