Triggermen starts out as a bad blend of Martin Scorsese and Cameron Crowe, then turns into an even worse mix of Crowe and Nora Ephron. It's the sort of film that, while you're watching it, you frequently stop and think to yourself "Wow. This is really not any good at all." From a relentless soundtrack that never stops assaulting your ears to a story that plops itself into that groove of maximum dullness equidistant from both comedy and drama to scenes that I hope were lamely improvised or else I'm afraid that writer Tony Johnston might have some kind of brain tumor, this is a movie where almost nothing works. I say almost because Claire Forlani is always nice to look at and Donnie Wahlberg proves again here that he is, amazingly enough, the more talented Wahlberg brother.
At the risk of giving you a brain cramp, here's the plot. Andy and Pete (Andrian Dunbar and Neil Morrissey) are a couple of British crooks who've found themselves stranded in Chicago. Pete manages to steal a briefcase that a mobster (Louis Di Banco) intended for a pair of out-of-town killers (Donnie Wahlberg and Michael Rapaport). The briefcase leads Andy and Pete to a hotel room where they learn the mobster wants the killers to murder a retiring crime boss (Pete Postlethwaite), who also happens to be staying at the same hotel. Andy and Pete decide to live it up in the hotel room for a couple of days on the mobster's dime, until the mobster and his right hand thug (Bill MacDonald) show up and mistake Andy and Pete for the out-of-town killers. Meanwhile, the Wahlberg half of the actual assassins gets infatuated with a beautiful woman (Claire Forlani) he sees at the hotel, who turns out to be the daughter of the retiring crime boss. Then Andy's pregnant girlfriend (Amanda Plummer) flies across the Atlantic and shows up at the hotel and if you haven't had an aneurysm by now, you've probably got a good sense of where it all goes from there.
Andy as a hapless blob and Pete and the overly enthusiastic friend who always gets him into trouble are vaguely amusing. The rest of the characters are as dry as desert sand and as shallow as a puddle of tears. The closest any of them come to human emotion is when Michael Rapaport feels neglected after his partner ditches him to make time with a girl. The rest of the performances are either so coarse they make a Catskills comedian seem subtle or so vacant they make the void of outer space seem like a more interesting dinner date. And while it's pretty standard for this kind of film to be propelled along by the characters' dumb decisions, these people are so moronic they shouldn't be able to dress themselves.
And let me again mention how aggravating the soundtrack of this thing was. I'm trying hard to block it all out, but I don't think there was a single scene-to-scene transition in the entire movie that wasn't underlined by 10 to 15 seconds of some annoying pop rock song. It got to the point where I began to wish that human beings as a species where born deaf, so that music would have never been invented and I would have been spared the umpteen melody missiles that Triggermen fired into my brain.
Nothing is helped by John Bradshaw's patchwork quilt approach to direction. There are bits like something out of a heist picture, bits out of something like a Coen Brothers' gangster picture, bits out of your basic romantic comedy, bits like a teen sex comedy and even a bit that belongs in some indy flick about men coming to grips with their latent homosexuality.
Sitting through Triggermen is a tiresome experience that no one else needs to go through. I suffered enough for the rest of the world.
At the risk of giving you a brain cramp, here's the plot. Andy and Pete (Andrian Dunbar and Neil Morrissey) are a couple of British crooks who've found themselves stranded in Chicago. Pete manages to steal a briefcase that a mobster (Louis Di Banco) intended for a pair of out-of-town killers (Donnie Wahlberg and Michael Rapaport). The briefcase leads Andy and Pete to a hotel room where they learn the mobster wants the killers to murder a retiring crime boss (Pete Postlethwaite), who also happens to be staying at the same hotel. Andy and Pete decide to live it up in the hotel room for a couple of days on the mobster's dime, until the mobster and his right hand thug (Bill MacDonald) show up and mistake Andy and Pete for the out-of-town killers. Meanwhile, the Wahlberg half of the actual assassins gets infatuated with a beautiful woman (Claire Forlani) he sees at the hotel, who turns out to be the daughter of the retiring crime boss. Then Andy's pregnant girlfriend (Amanda Plummer) flies across the Atlantic and shows up at the hotel and if you haven't had an aneurysm by now, you've probably got a good sense of where it all goes from there.
Andy as a hapless blob and Pete and the overly enthusiastic friend who always gets him into trouble are vaguely amusing. The rest of the characters are as dry as desert sand and as shallow as a puddle of tears. The closest any of them come to human emotion is when Michael Rapaport feels neglected after his partner ditches him to make time with a girl. The rest of the performances are either so coarse they make a Catskills comedian seem subtle or so vacant they make the void of outer space seem like a more interesting dinner date. And while it's pretty standard for this kind of film to be propelled along by the characters' dumb decisions, these people are so moronic they shouldn't be able to dress themselves.
And let me again mention how aggravating the soundtrack of this thing was. I'm trying hard to block it all out, but I don't think there was a single scene-to-scene transition in the entire movie that wasn't underlined by 10 to 15 seconds of some annoying pop rock song. It got to the point where I began to wish that human beings as a species where born deaf, so that music would have never been invented and I would have been spared the umpteen melody missiles that Triggermen fired into my brain.
Nothing is helped by John Bradshaw's patchwork quilt approach to direction. There are bits like something out of a heist picture, bits out of something like a Coen Brothers' gangster picture, bits out of your basic romantic comedy, bits like a teen sex comedy and even a bit that belongs in some indy flick about men coming to grips with their latent homosexuality.
Sitting through Triggermen is a tiresome experience that no one else needs to go through. I suffered enough for the rest of the world.