A couple of years ago, the UK arm of film distributor Revolver Entertainment went into administration. It was bad news for cinema audiences, who were left with one less alternative to the steady stream of toy commercials currently passing for studio output, and even worse news for Danny Dyer, who’d been relying on Revolver for income since the mid-00s.
Dyer vehicles, most of them straight-to-DVD titles with names like Nonce Puncher, had slowly become the distributor’s stock-in-trade, keeping the actor in new clothes and old habits for the best part of a decade. Sadly, the reliability of such work also rendered him risk-averse. Dyer has an endearing tendency to warn people away from the worst entries in his filmography on Twitter (“It is the biggest pile of shit I have ever done and that’s saying something,” he tweeted of one film) but that hasn’t kept him from churning out identikit atrocities year after year.
In Assassin, Dyer plays Jamie, a charisma-deficient hitman hired by both (count ’em) Kemp brothers to kill a corrupt council official attempting to stymie their plans for a new Croydon nightclub. Stakes thusly raised, Jamie performs his duties with all the cold, calculating precision you’d expect of a thirtysomething suburban contract killer, only to discover a shocking truth about his mark.
Dyer doesn’t so much go through the motions in the role as plead with the audience to save him the bother and recall the motions from last time. He’s undoubtedly a talented actor – Harold Pinter cast him twice – but it gets harder and harder to keep the faith each time he trots out the gruff hardman routine that’s on display here.
In an attempt to outrun his violent past, Jamie eventually moves to Brighton, where he inexplicably retrains as a fairground operator and, for a moment, it seems that Dyer might finally be allowed to inject a degree of sensitivity into the role. But soon enough Croydon catches up with him, and the autopilot clicks back into gear.
Signature Entertainment
Also out this week
The Imitation Game Alan Turing biopic suffering from selective amnesia.
The Hundred-Foot Journey Tale of culinary culture shock.
’71 Troubles-era action drama with Jack O’Connell.
