WHAT IT’S ABOUT: After finally realizing her boyfriend is just not that into her, slightly hyper kinetic Martha (Anna Kendrick) finds herself alone again, questioning everything about herself and what to do next. Not long after, after an incident at her friend’s pet store involving a near feral cat she thinks might be a cosmic metaphor for her own life, she ends up at a convenience store in search of Band-Aids. It’s here she literally bumps into Francis (Sam Rockwell), a guy who seems just about as kooky as she, he asking her for a date right off the bat. Something about him feels curious and irresistible, so the two spend the day together, she sensing something special about him while we – the audience – already know that he’s a world-class hitman. Can he balance a new relationship while a former colleague (Tim Roth) hunts him down? How will Martha take it when she catches on that her new beau is a contract killer? Will he still be Mr. Right?
QUICKIE REVIEW: Led by a very fun performance from the always reliable Rockwell, the film (directed by Paco Cabezas) sort of tries to juggle the often hard to manage mix of ultra violence and sweet romance with comedy and while it fails to strike with any great significance, is an amusing little title that is just off the beaten path enough to make it worth a look. Read our full review.
THROWING KNIVES MOMENT: Meet cutes are part and parcel to romcoms, bleeding their way into other genres as the trope firmly takes hold. Martha and Francis have their own such encounter of course, it at the end of an aisle filled with condoms. However, I really like a later scene when the two are at Martha’s place after a pleasant dinner date that left one man dead in the parking lot. You see, he’s never actually lied to Martha about his job, but his delivery of such truths have her convinced he’s just pulling her leg, like how we might say, “I had a killer day today.” We don’t actually mean it. Francis does.
Anyway, later that evening in her apartment, she asks him about ‘that thing he did in the store’ the day they met, referring to his remarkable hand skills in preventing a stack of condoms from hitting the floor, catching them all in a flash. She suggests he sometimes moves like he knows where things are going. He answers by asking if she would like to see a trick, to which she agrees, the scene cutting a few moments later with an array of kitchen knives laid out on the sofa ottoman. For most rational women, this would see like the best excuse to dial 911.
Not with Martha. She is taken in by Francis’ rhythmic seduction of it all, he explaining metaphysically about his theory on the spaces between things and how everything we see are just islands with currents beneath them, and if one pays attention, can be felt and anticipated. Soon enough, she’s feeling it too, moving in concert with him. He then brings a knife into the ‘dance’ and continues to teach her to ‘see’ where it’s going, eventually demonstrating his skill in catching a falling blade.
This freaks her out, sending her angrily to the other side of the room, with him saying he thought she was going to catch it. She screams back with an almost ‘duh, stupid’ howl that no, she can’t catch a knife. A brief back and forth erupts where she tries to end the decidedly weird date while he presses on, telling her that he knows she can feel it and then, well, throws a knife at her. Big surprise. She catches it.
WHY IT’S GREAT: Aside from the chemistry of the Rockwell and Kendrick, I like how the scene trips up conventions, layering in all sorts of romantic landmarks with soft music, starry-eyed glances, and evening amour and then tossing in kitchen knives. Where most movies would have one seducing the other with sensual touches and suggestive interludes, leading to a night of passion, this one does that and has the couple throwing sharpened steel. At each other. And then a night of passion. It’s clever, funny, oddly sexy (I’ll admit that), and a great little moment that really helps build up what’s to come.