bullish
Poor old Pierce Brosnan. Bond has not served him well. Firstly all of those films, save Goldeneye, were wretchedly bad; but what is more, ever since taking on the tux, irony of ironies, he keeps finding himself cast against type. The Tailor of Panama, After the Sunset, The Thomas Crown Affair • and now The Matador. But it’s often when railing against the Bond identity that he is at his most enjoyable and, thankfully, this is one such film.
He plays Julian, a hitman who suffers a mid-life crisis rather than the classic crisis of conscience, and who drags a hapless, competently amiable Greg Kinnear, as Danny, into the world of “facilitating fatalities”. There are also some corking twists along the way that it would be scurrilous of me to spoil. The important thing to say is that Brosnan is vastly excellent. There’s something appreciably giddy just under the surface of his performance that invests it with a wonderful vitality.
He oscillates masterfully between a despairing, tragic-comic sleaziness and a genuinely disquieting truculence. The script whips along with remarkable diversity, complexity and ingenuity: it’s one of the most continually interesting films there’s been for a long time.
2nd Mar 2006