USA. 2023.
Crew
Director – Jesse Atlas, Screenplay – Jesse Atlas & Aaron Wolfe, Producers – Jeff Elliott, Alex Echert, Najeeb Khuda, Gavin Lurie, Joel Shapiro & Thomas Sjolund, Photography – Bryan Koss, Music – Mark Tewarson, Production Design – Alec Contestabile. Production Company – Endless Media/Bricknell & Broadbridge International/magicCity Studios/Altamira Media/120db Films.
Cast
Nomzamo Mbatha (Alexa), Andy Allo (Mali), Bruce Willis (Valmora), Dominic Purcell (Adrian), Fernanda Andrade (Olivia), Mustafa Shakir (Sebastian), Barry Jane Minoff (Marko)
Plot
The former soldier Alexa is brought in to a secret location by Valmora. There she is introduced to a process that allows a person to remotely inhabit the mind of another by immersing themselves in a bath of ice water and connecting to an implant in the host’s body. Alexa’s lover Sebastian was employed as part of the program. She is shown video of how the body that Sebastian was inhabiting was shot by agents of Adrian. This has left Sebastian trapped in a comatose state until the implant from his host body can be retrieved. Using the process, Alexa is sent to inhabit various bodies and eliminate those close to Adrian. She is then sent in inhabiting the body of the artist Mali, whose work Adrian has taken a liking to, in an effort to get close to him and find Sebastian’s implant.
Bruce Willis has a sterling reputation as an actor since the 1980s. There should be no need to list his iconic work going back to tv’s Moonlighting (1985-9) and the meteoric takeoff of his cinematic career with his third starring film Die Hard (1990). The Bruce Willis of the 2020s has been another whole proposition. From about 2020, Bruce started to appear in a series of films that have to be considered universally terrible. These are mostly low-budget action films, although there are a handful of genre vehicles among these such as Breach (2020), Apex (2021), Cosmic Sin (2021) and Corrective Measures (2022).
In 2022, it was revealed that Willis was suffering from dementia, in particular from aphasia that left him with difficult with speech and comprehension. Willis, or presumably those close to him, signed up for a series of films where he would make $1-2 million per appearance usually for only a few minutes screen time in a supporting role that would be billed as the lead. Presumably this was accumulating money either for hospital bills or else to maximise creating an inheritance for his family in the time he had left (the less positive aspect could be that people were exploiting a confused Willis who presumably didn’t have the capacity to make such business decisions). In 2023, it was announced that he had deteriorated too badly to continue and was having difficulty even recognising where he was. Assassin was the last to be released of the films he made during this period.
Assassin was a directorial debut for Jesse Atlas. Atlas’s IMDB bio is an hilarious read – a perfect example of why an individual should never be allowed to write their own bios. “Jesse Atlas is a writer/director that crafts high-concept, character-driven genre thrillers” – before noting that Assassin is his debut feature. Even his short films are described as ‘mind-bending’ and ‘racking up dozens of awards and accolades.’
Assassin feels like a low-budget copy of Possessor (2020). I will be generous to Assassin and call it a coincidence of similar themes in that it went into production in early 2021, not long after Possessor came out. Nevertheless, both films are variants on the Bodyswap theme, featuring assassins who inhabit the bodies of others in order to get close to and kill their target. Possessor featured Andrea Riseborough trapped inside her host unable to be extracted. By contrast, Assassin feels like the story told from a different perspective where Nomzamo Mbatha enters the assassin program in order to rescue her love Mustafa Shakir, another operative who has become trapped inside somebody else’s body just like Andrea Riseborough was in Possessor.
This makes for an okay premise but it comes in a set-up that is extremely confusing. The film opens with a series of sequences – an old man attacks a young kid under a bridge; Bruce Willis is escorting Nomzamo Mbatha in an SUV when they are attacked by a middle-aged woman who it later becomes apparent is a possessed assassin; and flashbacks with Nomzamo Mbatha and Mustafa Shakir as a couple while serving as soldiers. It proves confusing because it is not clear how these scenes fit together. The flashbacks to Nomzamo and Mustafa are explained later but neither of the other two scenes seem connected to anything that happens subsequently.
As a result, when it comes to the main part of the story where Nomzamo Mbatha is introduced to the body-hopping process, you are trying to piece together how all of this relates to anything that is going on. There is no explanation in the script as to who Bruce Willis’s character is meant to be and how the rest of the team figure into anything. Even the bodyswap process looks a decidedly impoverished one – what should be taking place in a hi-tech laboratory instead appears to be shot in an abandoned railway station house where the actual process takes place in a bathtub.
Things become somewhat more coherent as the film goes on and with the introduction of Dominic Purcell as the bad guy and sleekly beautiful Andy Allo as the body that Nomzamo Mbatha is inhabiting. To his credit, Bruce Willis doesn’t give a performance that lets the show down. He is animated enough in the lines he gets to deliver. On the other hand, he could have been replaced by any other actor without anybody noticing and his presence adds little to the film. The film reaches an ending that comes with some modest effective in its eventual twist.
Trailer here