Tuesday, January 03, 2017

Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: True Memoirs of an International Assassin


Like GENIUS last week, TRUE MEMOIRS OF AN INTERNATIONAL ASSASSIN seems like a movie designed to appeal to me, although it's very, very different from that film about Thomas Wolfe and Max Perkins.

This one's a comedy starring Kevin James, who I tend to like quite a bit, and it's another movie about writing. In this case, James is a failed thriller novelist who works for an insurance company. When he finally manages to sell a manuscript about an assassin known only as The Ghost to a small-press publisher, the book is published as non-fiction instead of fiction, and of course you can make a pretty good guess how that's going to work out. James's character is taken for a real assassin, and before you know it, he's kidnapped and dumped down in the middle of a three-cornered war in a Central American country where the head of each faction wants to hire him to kill the other two rivals. Much running, shooting, and mildly amusing dialogue ensues.

Yes, it's all as silly as it can be, but I enjoyed it anyway. A lot of the publishing stuff is wrong, but the scenes where James is working on his manuscript, continually deleting and rewriting, ring true and are pretty funny. The supporting cast led by Andy Garcia as a revolutionary known as El Toro does decent work, and the plot has enough twists and turns to be interesting (although the final twist is really predictable).

I fully expect that many of you wouldn't care for this film. Kevin James's friendship with Adam Sandler and appearances in many of his movies might well be enough to predispose you not to like TRUE MEMOIRS OF AN INTERNATIONAL ASSASSIN. But if that's not the case, you could certainly find worse ways to spend a couple of hours. I had a good time watching it, that's all I can say.

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