Movie Review: ‘the Matador’

Since making his fame in TV’s “Remington Steele” in the early 1980s, Pierce Brosnan has played only slight variations of the same character: a suited spy, thief, or gentleman with a quick wit and a way with the ladies. He is a sort of upperclass British John Wayne, very good at what he does but never giving us any reason to think he has anything else in him.

A single image in “The Matador” shatters this conception: Brosnan, in only boots and a Speedo, dirty and unshaven, walks through a hotel lobby, oblivious to onlookers, taking long drags from a cigarette and sipping beer from a can.

Brosnan is Julian Noble, in his words a “facilitator of fatalities” working mostly on “corporate gigs.” No deviation there, and Noble as a hitman may well have been textbook Brosnan, say, a decade ago, but now he’s all washed up. Years on a steady diet of booze, cigarettes, and cheap prostitutes are beginning to get to him, and boy is it funny.

Noble meets Danny (Greg Kinnear), a white-bread salesman, in a hotel bar in Mexico City. Danny, who has had business trouble himself, starts a conversation with Noble, who insults him, either because he has forgotten how to be friendly, or he never learned in the first place. The next day, Noble tries to apologize to Danny and invites him to a bullfight, where he tells him what he does for a living. The two become friends. It’s a friendship of envy: Danny envies the danger and spontaneity in Noble’s life, and Julian envies the happiness, love, and stability in Danny’s.

The script is written by the film’s director, Richard Shephard, who has made nothing else worth mentioning, and frankly it’s pretty stupid. Shephard shoves too much sentimentality into “The Matador” and asks obvious moral questions like, “Does success necessarily include getting blood on your hands?” without ever bothering to answer them. By embracing the clich