KILLING GUNTHER: UNFUNNY COMEDY

It seems that the action heroes of the past several decades have been reduced to either parodies of their past glories or making movies that remain in the genre that gave them their stardom but far below what any of those films were. Consider that Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Dame have been making movies that are straight to DVD features with little of the glory of past efforts. Apparently Arnold Schwarzenegger is about to join that crowd. Worse yet, he’s only in the movie that has his name above the title for little more than 15 minutes at best.

KILLING GUNTHER is a faux documentary being shot at the behest of professional hitman Blake (SNL alum Taran Killam who also wrote and directed the film). Blake has organized a group of hitmen as a team to take down the legendary greatest hitman of all time, Robert “Gunther” Bendik. Each of his team members has their own specialty. For instance Donnie (fellow SNL alum Bobby Moynihan) is an expert with explosives. Of these the two funniest are long the shortest amount of time, one being a hitman with a robotic arm that squeezes when it’s battery runs out and another a poison expert who at one point attempts to throw a bottle of venom at Gunther who is hundreds of yards away.

As the story goes Blake and his crew plot out how they intend to take down Gunther until the first of them is killed by their intended victim. With Gunther realizing they are out to take him down this sets the team on edge as they are now targets as well as hunters. We catch glimpses of Gunther in the distance but never quite get a good look at him. Which is a problem for the team since none of them has ever seen him face to face.

Rather than make this a AND THEN THERE WERE NONE style movie the film instead focuses on the ineptitude of the team and in particular their leader Blake. How he could have been one of the top assassins in the world prior to his goal here is beyond me. But supposedly he is as are the rest of the team. But that’s not the worst thing going on here.

The worst is that the movie plays out like one of those terrible SNL skits where they come up with a decent premise that might make a good 2-3 minute skit only to draw it out to 5-6 minutes. In this case they draw it out to 92 minutes. As I sit here typing I can think of perhaps 2-3 moments when I found something slightly funny and none of those 2-3 were side splitters. When the credits rolled I at first thought well that wasn’t so bad but the more I thought about it the worse the film became.

The one shining light in the entire film was Schwarzenegger and he doesn’t even appear until the last 20-25 minutes of the film. SPOILER ALERT: It appears that Gunther has been following the team all along and is filming his own documentary of the event, a sort of documentary being shot about a documentary. Arnold plays his moments here for laughs and those 2-3 I mentioned come mostly from his direction.

The biggest issues here revolve around Killam. His acting is on the straight to DVD level, his direction here when combined with his script shows his biggest weaknesses. Those revolve around the fact that the movie is just not funny. Someone should have taken the time to tell him that the jokes were lame at best, that seeing a character scream in frustration is not funny and that the reason for his obsession to kill Gunther, a jilted lover who left him for the titular character but then left him as well, is ridiculous.

One of Schwarzenegger’s biggest catch phrases was “I’ll be back”. If this is what he’s going to be making then he won’t be back for long. Fortunately for fans the new 4k restoration of TERMINATOR 2: JUDGEMENT DAY was also released this week as well. My money says watch that again. Or TWINS. Or even KINDERGARTEN COP. But don’t waste your time on this one.

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