Dan Franzen (dfranzen70) In The Matador, Pierce Brosnan plays a weary, boozy contract killer who just wants to be friends with Walter Mitty-like Greg Kinnear. Sounds like perfect casting, but the two leads don't really mesh, and the movie plods along endlessly, halfheartedly throwing in a twist near the end that only slightly mitigates the dullness.Julian Noble trots the globe, shooting, stabbing, and exploding those whom he's paid to terminate. He's not a likable chap, this Julian. He likes his liquor strong and his girls young, if you know what I mean. After a job in Mexico City, Julian learns he may be on his way out of his amorphous organization; he then bumps into Danny Wright (Kinnear), a businessman who believes he's just made a successful pitch to a local company. Julian comes off as kind of a rude jerk who may or not be telling the truth, but once he convinces (truthfully) Danny that he (Julian) is indeed a paid assassin, the two sort of become pals.It's a typical mismatched-buddies scenario - the loner and the married man, the odd duck and the straight arrow. Danny is married to Bean (Hope Davis), who becomes a little starstruck herself when she learns of Julian's occupation. But what of Julian's future? Will he soon be rubbed out by one of his own coworkers? This seems like a role tailor made for Brosnan, kind of a down-on-his-luck James Bond, but for some reason the character is a nasty, tough-to-read creep. Is he sincere or a sociopath? Is he being funny or deadly serious? When he pulls the old messing-with-you trope once too often, you start to wonder what he's all about - and you get no real satisfactory answers.The twist is okay, but in even a decent thriller it would have been terrific. Here it's just sort of there, as if the writers had realized they needed to tack on something a little off the beaten path and just kind of shoehorned it into the story. The Matador isn't incomprehensible, it's just maddeningly incoherent.

Rodrigo Amaro Everybody needs friends or some sort of friendship to go through things in this life. As said in "It's a Wonderful Life" one can't be considered a failure if he or she has a friend. With this philosophy in mind what would think of a hit-man who has difficulties in making friends and needs to find one? What kind of trouble he would have? This is the dilemma of Julian (Pierce Brosnan) while visiting Mexico where he has a target to kill but instead he meets Danny (Greg Kinnear), an troubled salesman who's there for a business that can change his life after lots of failed business.This unlikely friendship is the basis of "The Matador", a film that discuss the importance of having friends even if people and their jobs have nothing in common. Somehow, the story will prove that these guys need each other to share values and experiences, and that everything might work out for them even that we could probably think that these guys are completely different from each other.Almost like "Analyze This", this comedy takes the cliché of an dangerous man who has a nervous breakdown that ruins his life and work, can't function at all and realizes that his life is a mess, he's not married, don't have friends and no place to stay, always traveling around the world to kill people. But he's an unpleasant man, very inconvenient, joking at the wrong time and always tries to involve Danny into his life of work. Confusion and trouble ahead!Treated as a comedy with a few action sequences, this is a good film but never hilariously funny. Has some good jokes (Brosnan dreaming of being a cheerleader) but that's it. If the writer was more clever he could have made of this an efficient thriller.The few thrilling sequences present here are shallow and inexcusable if we have to believe that Julian, a pro, really needs Danny to perform his last job, quoting that the other guy needs to distract the bodyguard of his target since the angle he has to execute his shooting doesn't allow him to do much. This moment is quite dumb,; a professional hit-man would find a way to do the job, even with a breakdown over his shoulders (and specially if knowing beforehand who is the target). The movie survives to this and some other flaws (it takes a lot of time to put these opposite forces together), delivers a good message, greatly presented and without being corny; the cast is really good, Brosnan is quite surprising and has some of the best lines of the movie along with Hope Davis (playing Kinnear's wife); and the soundtrack is brilliant with hits from The Jam, The Killers, Tom Jones and Asia.Helping or not, making us smile or not, that's what friends are for...even if the only one you have is a matador. 7/10

Boba_Fett1138 In a way this movie is being like the crime version of "Lost in Translation". It uses a very similar concept of a burned out, aging hit-man meeting an average Joe, in a foreign country and decide on spending their time together. It even somewhat uses the same approach of mixing comedy with serious drama. Not saying that this is a bad thing, or something that really matters but it was just a fun observation I made.The movie is still good and original to watch on its own though luckily. It's a movie with some hits and misses in it but overall I still consider it to be an above average one.The movie does feel a bit awkward at times with its comedy, that just seems to come and go within this movie. The one moment it's a real goofy movie to watch, while the movie mostly is still made in a very serious fashion and tone. But still it helps to make the movie pleasant and easy to watch. And this is a good thing, since it isn't exactly the movie its story that is being its strongest aspect.It's as if the director himself also didn't had really enough confidence in his own written script and tried to spice things up more with an over-stylized, hip, modern style that instead more often came across as too desperate and too wannabee. All of the sings of an inexperienced director but Richard Shepard actually isn't that inexperienced at all, which makes it odd that he really made some wrong choices at times with this movie.One thing that bugged me for instance was that we never saw the Pierce Brosnan character kill anybody in this movie, even though he does supposedly kill a whole bunch of people. Again, to me this was a sign that the director just didn't had enough confidence in either his script and actors. He must had been worried that we wouldn't care or sympathize with the Pierce Brosnan character if we saw him killing people in cold blood.And there absolutely was no reason for that, since it really are the actors that pull this movie and its story through. They do such a good job and I think I have to admit that I have never seen Pierce Brosnan act so well within a movie. He's very convincing and they also did a great job at aging him up. Yes, he of course was already in his 50's but he seems to be a guy that simply ever refuses to start to look old, until this movie came along, in which he really looks like a burned out guy, at an age when everything seems to go downhill for him from now on.So it really is far from a perfect movie, or a must-see but it's a good movie to watch if you happen to catch it on TV when nothing else is on. You probably won't regret watching it, despite of all of its flaws and weaknesses (such as also its editing, which I forgot to mention before) that are in it.7/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/

phillip-davies Pierce Brosnan should have got an award for his wickedly humorous performance as a sleazy yet humanly flawed hit-man. You can see all the Royal Shakespeare Company credentials from his early theatre days, before Hollywood hired him to perform - very profitably - for audiences of morons. Many, many such morons, who had him nicely stereotyped where they liked him, have tried to sink a film that embarrasses them with the sight of an assassin who is just like Bond, but stripped of the fake glamour that made his vulgarity and wickedness acceptable to their shallow morality - all rote observance without real soul as that hypocrite's comforter is. No doubt more could have been done to intensify the sinister side of the scenario - but then who can reasonably complain at having a grown-up comedy, at least, instead of yet another disgustingly stupid teen flick?Afer all, it is made perfectly clear (BIG SPOILER AHEAD) in the late flashback to the scene where it turns out we had wrongly assumed - just as Bean the wife had been lied to about this incident - that Danny righteously refused to open the door to Julian, whereas in fact the scene plays out to its conclusion only when we see that the distinctly ignoble Noble actually has qualms - if not exactly scruples! - about corrupting an only decent-ish man! This, of course, is just the sort of shifting moral perspective that makes our poor precious little PC darlings quite queasy, and sends them scurrying out of the cinema as fast as their little legs can carry them.It is making a creative jest of what some folk only see in absolutist and black-and-white terms that is so offensive to them. A more sinister, less likable assassin would have left them comfortable and untroubled - because he would not have touched them. The only honest good people are the relatively good, like Danny and Bean, who are at least honest enough to admit they have a weakness for this terrible man and his easy, sleazy good-natured dirty glamour, yet still preserve their own simple amiable decency. What saves this often horribly naive couple is that they have retained enough human curiosity and empathy to avoid the meaningless safety of that same prescriptive Political Correctness that can find little better to criticise this film for than showing a bullfight. The furore this caused entirely missed the point of a film that, after all, was called 'The Matador' precisely in order to show how strangely life-affirming the contemplation of Death can actually be! Indeed, such purging of our darker instincts and desires was no less than a religious act of moral salvation - 'catharsis' - in the ancient Greek tragedy.This is no Greek tragedy, of course, but the film does show a real awareness of the dark side, and simply chooses instead to tread delicately but deliberately around its sinister subject, with perhaps something of the wit of the Picador on his balletic feet, a spectacle which our metaphorical Matador commends to his new friend's attention.This is (as it were) the dying bull's gift to the man he recognises as his better. An undemonstratively brilliant little film, then, and as light and sharp as a short story or a Picador's lance, and beautifully weighted to the sad but dignified end it is directed towards.