Bullet Points: Assassin (2023)
When the news broke last year about Bruce Willis’ medical condition, the past few years of his career suddenly made sense. And while Bruce’s health has forced him to retire from the acting game, he already had multiple movies in the pipeline, including the subject of this edition of Bullet Points, the sci-fi action thriller Assassin…
- Everybody Hates Bruce: Alexa (Nomzamo Mbatha), a former soldier, is looking for answers. Her husband Sebastian (Mustafa Shakir), a drone pilot in the military is currently in a coma. Like Alexa, you may be wondering how in the hell does a drone pilot end up hospitalized in a coma!? Alexa confronts Sebastian’s superior Valmora (Bruce Willis, Die Hard) with a gun to his head! Valmora calms her down, but before he can get her back home… a mild-mannered woman approaches Valmora and attacks him! What the hell is going on?
- Every Body is a Weapon: It turns out that Sebastian was not your traditional drone pilot. Sebastian was a part of a new experimental drone program that allows any human to be transformed into a drone. These human drones are controlled by a trained soldier and then turned into perfect assassins. There are a couple of problems however… One, the psychological aftermath the soldier’s have to deal with jumping into other people’s bodies… Two, the technology has fallen into the wrong hands, namely the villainous Adrian (Dominic Purcell, Vikingdom). Which explains why that mild-mannered woman tried to assassinate Valmora.
- Alexa, Go Kill Adrian: Now Alexa finds herself in the same place her husband Sebastian was (a sci-fi bath tub), entering stranger’s bodies armed with the mantra “This is not my body”. Alexa’s goal is to eliminate Adrian’s associates in hopes of flushing Adrian out, so they can eliminate him once and for all. That plan proves to be easier said than done. Alexa, while in the body of artist Mali (Andy Allo), may be getting too close to Adrian… and while Valmora and his team is trying to take out Adrian, Adrian is also trying to take out them!
The story made great use of the technology involved and as the movie played out Assassin kept me guessing. Are the characters on the screen really them? Or have they become drones? The guessing game continued all the way to the end with some plot twists I did not see coming.
Bruce Willis is a strong supporting player in the film and gives Assassin some star power. But it is Nomzamo’s Mbatha who is clearly the star of the show. Mbatha’s Alexa is driven and her moral compass is always pointed in the right direction… which leads to a lot of internal conflict. Dominic Purcell makes for an effective villain with an eerie presence every time he is on the screen and like any villain worth their salt, I was ready to see Adrian get his.
Assassin was directed by Jesse Atlas, who also wrote the film along with Aaron Wolfe. Assassin will be released in select theaters and on VOD and Digital on March 31, 2023 from Saban Films.
