The Virtuoso

_**“Are you an assassin?” “I’m a soldier.” “You’re neither.”**_ A professional assassin (Anson Mount) is given an ambiguous gig in a small town in the Poconos. Can he get the job done with as little collateral damage as possible? Anthony Hopkins plays his boss, Abbie Cornish a waitress and David Morse a deputy. "The Virtuoso" (2021) is a neo-noir crime drama/thriller with a Tarantino bent. Films with criminal protagonists don’t usually interest me unless there’s angle of redemption or some other intriguing aspect. “Death Wish,” “The Punisher” and “Taken” are exceptions because the central character isn’t really a criminal, but rather a (anti)hero on a mission of justice denied by the system. This is a well-made neo-noir with an interesting second person narration. It doesn’t focus on eye-rolling action scenes and explosions every five minutes, but rather the assassin figuring out the mission, executing it (no pun intended) and surviving. Unfortunately the gross contrivances of the script emerge in the last act and it’s impossible to suspend disbelief, as they say. I get the message of the film, but what do I care? Assassins who heartlessly murder people simply to make a good living are criminal scumbags and should be executed themselves. Still, the heavy mood is to die for, the psychology of a professional assassin is well written, Mount makes for a great masculine protagonist, Abbie is jaw-dropping in a curvy way, the second-person narration is effective and the locations & score are superb. The movie runs 1 hour, 50 minutes, and was shot in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in the Poconos, as well as Santa Ynez, California, which is about an hour’s drive west of Malibu. GRADE: B-/C+

There isn't the slightest trace of virtuosity here — or, for that matter, of competence —, whether in front of or behind the camera, except for what Anthony Hopkins brings from his own unlimited personal reserve. Contrary to what one might believe, the title does not refer to Hopkins’s character, but to Anson Mount (The Virtuoso ends up coming across as a nickname the character is too dumb to realize is ironic), a professional assassin who offsets the laconic nature of his profession with an endless and soporific narration that sounds as if he were reading long passages from Murder for Dummies; even a hypothetical viewer who has never seen a Hitman Movie like this would find this excess of exposure overwhelming. Perhaps the movie should be called The Theoretician, because all of Mount’s encyclopedic knowledge is of little use to him in practice, an area in which he proves to be rather inept. Consider a job which must be made to look like an accident; his approach is to cause a literal traffic accident, and hope for the best (or, from the victim’s point of view, the worst). Considering this haphazard method, it’s no surprise that an unrelated third party becomes a bonus kill for Mount — although he is inexplicably upset by this turn of events. Why should this bother him? Killing is killing, and morally there is little or no difference between killing someone for money and killing them through negligence; I can only conclude that what bugs Mount is having killed someone for free. In any case, Mount’s minor crisis of conscience prompts The Mentor (Hopkins) to tell him an autobiographical story about “following orders” and “obeying his superiors” as a young soldier in the army; it’s a clichéd speech, but Hopkins effortlessly elevates the material and makes it easily the best thing in the entire movie. Then again, it takes but a fraction of Hopkins’s considerable talent to elevate this dumbass script above the abject mediocrity that is its natural state. Consider the crux of the plot: The Virtuoso gets a note from the Mentor concerning his latest assignment that offers no other info than a date and time (and the words “White Rivers” which could be the name of a person or a place; the answer, however, turns out to be something much more inane). Mount arrives on the scene confused as to who the target is, which results in the death of two or three people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time; this not only goes against everything — and its a lot — he has told us about “precision” and “perfection”, but it also makes him look like a hypocrite, since this time the "collateral damage" does not faze him in the least. Moreover, Mount never for a second finds all these unnecessary complications suspicious, nor does it ever occur to him that if someone really wanted someone else dead, they wouldn’t make a riddle about the whole thing.