What a beautiful movie!

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Married couple Bean (Hope Davis) and Danny Wright (Greg Kinnear) are still recovering from their son's death three years earlier. Danny on a Mexico City business trip encounters Julian Noble (Pierce Brosnan). He is surprised that Julian is actually a hired killer and refuses to help Julian on a job. Julian continues his jobs but his lonely womanizing killing lifestyle starts to take a toll. His failures force his handler Mr. Randy (Philip Baker Hall) to consider terminating him. It's Christmas in Denver when Julian shows up at the Wright home.Pierce Brosnan delivers a fun assassin. Julian and Danny in Mexico City is loads of fun. The problem is that it never gets any better than that. It would be much better to have the guys join up from Mexico and continue a wacky killing road adventure all the way to the end. This has the parts to make for a fun killer duo but it doesn't completely deliver.

Only recently, I have purchased some of the DVD sets of the old TV shows from the 1980's, the great classics of entertainment and by today's standards as cheesy as they have ever been. Among them is the first season of "Remington Steele", about a detective named Laura Holt, who invents a male boss in order to attract more clients, until one day a strange con man takes over the imaginary part of Remington Steele and from that point on works with Laura solving cases of all sorts. That was the first big role of a young man named Pierce Brosnan, but when the show was taken off the air after six successful years, Brosnan's career kicked into really high gears. He played the famous British agent James Bond in four films, but after "Die another Day", almost a parody on the franchise, he was dismissed from the role and went on to star in other projects.Pierce Brosnan, who coincidentally got a hold of Richard Shepard's script, not only agreed to take over the leading role but also became one of the producers, causing the film's budget to rise significantly. It seems as if this movie was exactly what he was looking for and after being the action hero for so long, and the stylish British gentleman, he finally gets to play an unpleasant, rude and bad ass character, who completely goes against anything he has played before. The result is an entertaining mix of comedy and drama about an unusual friendship that takes a couple of unexpected twists and turns.Julian Noble is a professional hit man, who believes he has the greatest job in the world and travels all over the planet to take out his targets. He doesn't have a home, not a single friend and his romantic interests merely consist of one-night affairs with hookers. Danny Wright on the other hand is a regular businessman, who lost his only son in a school bus accident, is happily married with his high school sweetheart, and now travels to Mexico City to sign a contract that could save his career. The two men, that couldn't be any more different from each other, meet at the hotel bar one night and after a couple of rude remarks by Julian and immediate apologies the two begin to form somewhat of a friendship. Julian takes Danny to the bull fighting arena, where he reveals himself to be an assassin and even demonstrates how he would take out his target. But Danny is not appalled but merely fascinated by this strange man, and ultimately Julian even asks his new friend to help him with one of his jobs. As it turns out though, Julian begins to doubt himself and his unethical profession and after screwing up several of his contracts, his bosses put out a hit on him, causing him to seek the help of his only friend, Danny."The Matador" is a very interesting little film that made it lot out of its limited possibilities. Despite having Pierce Brosnan in the leading role, who is always a good candidate for a fast-paced action movie, there are very little action scenes in this film, and it is more of a buddy comedy and relationship drama. Although there are some funny scenes, mostly coming from the dialogs between Danny and Julian, especially when the latter makes one of his inappropriate comments, there are also some somber moments, especially involving Danny and his dead son. The film is R-rated, so you will find your typical use of several f-words, but I would be more concerned with the large number of sexual jokes. Richard Shepard, whose previous work mostly consists of B-movies wrote a dynamic script that mostly focuses on the strange relationship of Julian and Danny, two wonderfully constructed characters with their flaws and good sides to them. But he ultimately concentrates so much on them, that the characters and their dialogs completely dominate the film and the plot is somewhat neglected in the process. There is only a very fragile story attached to this 90 minute film, which causes it to run very slow for some time, especially once the setting shifts from Mexico City to Denver. The other issue with this film is the set design, which was very austere at times, and I had a hard time finding where the $10 Million of budget went.Pierce Brosnan is at his very best in this film and this might be his finest work ever. He is unbelievably funny, and completely contrary to his usual image, does stuff like walking through a hotel bar lobby in underwear, make a rude joke after hearing about Danny's dead son and, of course, instead of the obligatory "shaken, not stirred" Vodka Martini he now drinks Margaritas, four of five of them in a row even. Julian Noble is an obnoxious, but likable character, and without Pierce Brosnan this film certainly would have lost a lot of its freshness and charm. Greg Kinnear plays Danny, a regular guy, who stands in complete contrast to Julian Noble. While he doesn't get to shine as much as Brosnan, whose role is simply better written, he does a fantastic job both as the nerdy businessman, and later the cool assistant of Julian. There is also Hope Davis as Danny's cute wife Bean and Philipp Baker Hall as Julian's handler, who appears in maybe two scenes for a total screen time of less than five minutes.Without Pierce Brosnan, "The Matador" would have been a typical independent film without any stars, but a strong script that is shown on a couple of film festivals and then is never heard of again. But instead, this film has now turned into something bigger, changing the image of Pierce Brosnan's character repertoire forever, and providing its audience with a wonderful film about a friendship that is not always top-notch, but enjoyable nevertheless.

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.

I enjoyed this movie quite a bit more than I necessarily expected to. I remember seeing some things about it around the time it was released and it sounded somewhat interesting but not like something I needed to rush out and see. After all, it's not like Greg Kinnear is the king of any sane person's film universe, although I used to enjoy him on "Movietime" and "E" doing the Talk Soup. Pierce Brosnan is somebody who I hadn't seen in a movie until a few years ago when I saw the excellent "Seraphim Falls", since I tend to avoid James Bond movies. But something about the pairing of these two guys seemed appealing, and the movie bears out that instinct. These guys are fun to watch together, they have a real natural chemistry that makes even some of the film's weaker scenes flow very neatly.I like the fact that this is sort of a tough, violent movie that has a decent amount of blood and sex in it, but it's not raunchy in the way that Quentin Tarantino's movies are, not in a sort of way that's designed to appeal to 15 year old boys. The whole joke and premise of the movie is basically that this guy who Brosnan plays is no longer hardcore, he's basically a self-appointed failure in the middle of a nervous breakdown. In the end the Kinnear character is more hardcore than he is, and that's a great premise I think to hang the movie around since it's ultimately only a 90 minute piece of fluff anyway. Nobody should go away hoping for any kind of revelations on the human spirit, and although I liked Hope Davis in the role I thought the movie could have done with maybe a bit less dramatic scenes with her and Kinnear. It's great to see how well Kinnear can handle drama though, and the other major reversal inherent in the premise is to have Brosnan play the goofier character and have Kinnear play the more serious role. I think a lot of times when you reverse expectations that way you get a very fresh movie with fresh performances.It'll never be known as a classic or anything, but this is going to be one of those movies that gets brought up at a party or in a bar and maybe the 2 or 3 people who did see it will all chime in with "hey, yeah that was pretty good wasn't it?". Not quite "the greatest cocktail party story you ever heard" but not too far either. I like the fact that Julian, the Brosnan character, was quite the prick and the movie didn't go out of its way to make him likable. It's interesting to see a charming actor like Brosnan basically tread water and try to pull through a character like that and make him appealing in some way.