Directed by Robert Luketic. Starring Ashton Kutcher, Katherine Heigl, Tom Selleck, Catherine O'Hara, Katheryn Winnick, Kevin Sussman. 12A cert, gen release, 93 min.
THERE’S something nagging at me. Here’s Ashton Kutcher – head as meaty as ever – swanning about the French Riviera in a sports car. He’s wearing a suit. Fair enough. He’s wearing a cravat. We’ll let him away with that also. But why is he talking like that?
Kutcher’s stoner drawl is gone and he’s taken to enunciating his words freakily clearly while tipping his head slowly to one side. Maybe he’s got some seawater trapped behind his cochlea. Oh, no, no, no. Now, I get it. Ashton Kutcher thinks he’s Cary Grant.
Robert Luketic, director of atrocities such as Legally Blondeand Monster-in-Law, has cast Kutcher opposite Kathryn Heigl in a comedy set in the south of France, and the star has somehow come to believe he's the hero of To Catch a Thief. Please stop, Ashton. No, seriously. Argh! My eyes, eyes!
I would continue with some glib phrase along the lines of "you have no idea how bad Killersis", but, in truth, if you've seen anything involving Kutcher or Luketic before, you have a fair notion what to expect.
For the record, the lanky heart- throb (who, to be fair, is fine when playing within his narrow range) falls for Heigl, but somehow neglects to tell her that he is a government assassin. They marry. Three years later, now employed as a property developer, Ashton finds history catching up with him when a bounty is placed on his head.
Space precludes a full inventory of the ways in which Luketic illustrates the limitation of his painfully fragile talent. Neither Heigl nor Kutcher seems to have any idea where to stand. The director’s attempts to ape Paul Greengrass in the action sequences are characterised by an unintentionally hilarious tendency to keep shaking the camera after the violence has died down.
The film fails most spectacularly, however, in the areas of tone and moral geography. This is a feather- light comedy – as light as Legally Blonde– during which at least a dozen people are brutally murdered by the supposedly cuddly romantic antagonists. Imagine Mamma Mia! with beheadings and you're halfway there.
