Stometer Save your money for something good and enjoyable

Kaydan Christian A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Mathilde the Guild Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

Scarlet The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

Dan Franzen (dfranzen70) In The Matador, Pierce Brosnan plays a weary, boozy contract killer who just wants to be friends with Walter Mitty-like Greg Kinnear. Sounds like perfect casting, but the two leads don't really mesh, and the movie plods along endlessly, halfheartedly throwing in a twist near the end that only slightly mitigates the dullness.Julian Noble trots the globe, shooting, stabbing, and exploding those whom he's paid to terminate. He's not a likable chap, this Julian. He likes his liquor strong and his girls young, if you know what I mean. After a job in Mexico City, Julian learns he may be on his way out of his amorphous organization; he then bumps into Danny Wright (Kinnear), a businessman who believes he's just made a successful pitch to a local company. Julian comes off as kind of a rude jerk who may or not be telling the truth, but once he convinces (truthfully) Danny that he (Julian) is indeed a paid assassin, the two sort of become pals.It's a typical mismatched-buddies scenario - the loner and the married man, the odd duck and the straight arrow. Danny is married to Bean (Hope Davis), who becomes a little starstruck herself when she learns of Julian's occupation. But what of Julian's future? Will he soon be rubbed out by one of his own coworkers? This seems like a role tailor made for Brosnan, kind of a down-on-his-luck James Bond, but for some reason the character is a nasty, tough-to-read creep. Is he sincere or a sociopath? Is he being funny or deadly serious? When he pulls the old messing-with-you trope once too often, you start to wonder what he's all about - and you get no real satisfactory answers.The twist is okay, but in even a decent thriller it would have been terrific. Here it's just sort of there, as if the writers had realized they needed to tack on something a little off the beaten path and just kind of shoehorned it into the story. The Matador isn't incomprehensible, it's just maddeningly incoherent.

robert-temple-1 This is a strange one, which curiously does not really concern matadors either. Pierce Brosnan is brilliant at playing a professional hit man who is going to pieces psychologically because he is burnt-out and can no longer carry out his murder assignments. I do not really approve of films in which hit men are portrayed as socially acceptable, and like the proverbial 'prostitute with the heart of gold', are really nice and admirable people if we can just understand them and try not to be prejudiced against them. We live in an age of moral relativism at best, or should I say moral nihilism. And it is an interesting sociological question to ask why it is that so many films are made about hit men. What is it about professional killers that makes us want to devote film after film to them? Are there no more pleasant characters we could consider instead? Is it really funny when hit men are involved in comic situations? Ha ha ha. He couldn't pull the trigger, silly fellow, so let's give him a drink and try and cheer him up. And let's all have a laugh at his inability to carry out an assassination. Now, seriously, is this what we should be watching? The 'buddy' of the killer is played by Greg Kinnear, whose role as Jack Kennedy in the mini-series THE KENNEDYS (2011, see my review), I have already described previously as a brilliant portrayal. He is a fine actor who does an excellent job of being a 'normal guy' and, hence, a bit of a simpleton when compared to the much cleverer Brosnan, who has the good sense to be a professional assassin (the implication being that if Kinnear weren't such a fool, he would be out there killing people too). When asked to help kill someone, Kinnear at first refuses, but then enthusiastically joins in. His resistance is pretty feeble, and the moral to viewers seems to be: come on, folks, why not join in the fun? Let's all kill people for money, it's great. Pardon my dissenting voice in this matter. Although the film is witty, funny, and amusing, it is also morally deeply disturbing and should not have been made. It merely adds one more drop to the drip-drip-drip of what remains of the moral fabric of our civilisation going down the drain. But hey, let's live for the moment, oil our guns, and enjoy killing people while we can. Yes, this is a highly civilised film, a film about a civilisation which is in such a state of terminal decadence that even plenty of laughter cannot save it.

Abrar Raza Please don't expect our regular Brosnan. No Shattered(2007), no After the Sunset(2004), and definitely not a 007. He plays his age. And do does the same with panache and the class.Plot Sum: A hit-man meets a regular person(Kinnear). A regular, out of the league of the characters, friendship develops. Leading to a regular end.It Says: The human nature knows no bound in representing their inherent character of being social, which actually, is situational. Anyway, when the so called frequency matches-up, the acceptance leads to expectation. And that expectation threads-up one more purpose of being there. Life is not always about the defined relationships. Sometimes you can also invent a new name of any sort of bonding. Don't restrict yourself, but with caution... :)Enjoy!

Boba_Fett1138 In a way this movie is being like the crime version of "Lost in Translation". It uses a very similar concept of a burned out, aging hit-man meeting an average Joe, in a foreign country and decide on spending their time together. It even somewhat uses the same approach of mixing comedy with serious drama. Not saying that this is a bad thing, or something that really matters but it was just a fun observation I made.The movie is still good and original to watch on its own though luckily. It's a movie with some hits and misses in it but overall I still consider it to be an above average one.The movie does feel a bit awkward at times with its comedy, that just seems to come and go within this movie. The one moment it's a real goofy movie to watch, while the movie mostly is still made in a very serious fashion and tone. But still it helps to make the movie pleasant and easy to watch. And this is a good thing, since it isn't exactly the movie its story that is being its strongest aspect.It's as if the director himself also didn't had really enough confidence in his own written script and tried to spice things up more with an over-stylized, hip, modern style that instead more often came across as too desperate and too wannabee. All of the sings of an inexperienced director but Richard Shepard actually isn't that inexperienced at all, which makes it odd that he really made some wrong choices at times with this movie.One thing that bugged me for instance was that we never saw the Pierce Brosnan character kill anybody in this movie, even though he does supposedly kill a whole bunch of people. Again, to me this was a sign that the director just didn't had enough confidence in either his script and actors. He must had been worried that we wouldn't care or sympathize with the Pierce Brosnan character if we saw him killing people in cold blood.And there absolutely was no reason for that, since it really are the actors that pull this movie and its story through. They do such a good job and I think I have to admit that I have never seen Pierce Brosnan act so well within a movie. He's very convincing and they also did a great job at aging him up. Yes, he of course was already in his 50's but he seems to be a guy that simply ever refuses to start to look old, until this movie came along, in which he really looks like a burned out guy, at an age when everything seems to go downhill for him from now on.So it really is far from a perfect movie, or a must-see but it's a good movie to watch if you happen to catch it on TV when nothing else is on. You probably won't regret watching it, despite of all of its flaws and weaknesses (such as also its editing, which I forgot to mention before) that are in it.7/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/