REVIEW: Despite Bill Nighy and Emily Blunt, Wild Target More Mild Than Wild

Apparently, distinguished actors getting their gun-toting genre jollies is all the rage this fall. A British companion piece to the recent Red, Wild Target stars Bill Nighy as Victor Maynard, a hit man who dispatches death with incomparable flair and conscienceless ease. Victor lives a life of precision, which means it doesn't really involve people other than those he's contracted to kill.

Lacking any identity -- including a sexual one -- outside of his profession, he's a killer whose development essentially stopped at age seven, when he was presented with a Beretta ("the prince of pistols," his mother, played by Eileen Atkins, eventually reminds her ungrateful son). The picture begins as a stylish, curve-hugging assassination caper: When he's hired to kill Rose, an art grifter played by Emily Blunt, Victor's renowned nerve falters. But Wild Target gets its gears gunked up by a detour into the shallow, polluted waters of pseudo-psychological melodrama. In a farce, such a lapse would be unforgivable; in a mordant action film, it's just bewildering.

It's hard to tell what Wild Target is offering, besides the pleasure of its company. Even that is overestimated, as both the script (by Lucinda Coxon) and British comedy legend Jonathan Lynn's direction lack the wit and invention that might have given the film some fizz. The extent to which it's novel to watch Nighy smoke his targets without a flinch and give his best Eastwood squint a whirl is estimable, but not unlimited. Similarly, Blunt is charming as a petulant hustler with a gift for grab; her ripe cheeks and lips and insolent gaze are the main attractions here, as they are elsewhere. But the film framing them goes all soft in the middle, its tone less whimsical than subject to stale whimsy.

After he follows Rose for a day or so and finds himself unable to get a decent bead, Victor's bluff is called when Ferguson (Rupert Everett), the gangster whom Rose conned into buying a fake Rembrandt, hires a new hit man to kill her. On the run from the new guy (played by Martin Freeman, whose sleazy smile reveals a pristine barricade of fake choppers), Victor convinces Rose he's a detective who can protect her and a random young chap named Tony (Rupert Grint) who got caught in the middle of a who's-on-first shoot up. It turns out Tony is a crack shot -- an untrained natural -- and this captures Victor's attention. Whether that attention is paternal or sexual in nature becomes one of the film's more wearisome subplots. Even Victor doesn't seem sure, having never tangled with anything like an emotion for another human being. While the characters lie low in a hotel room and then at Victor's fancy estate, the uncertainty is played for uncomfortable laughs that culminate in a full-frontal face-off.

Perhaps even more awkward is the dynamic between Victor and Rose, who is determined to loosen up the old goat, and ideally con him into love. "It's so safe in here it's dangerous," she complains of Victor's plastic-wrapped fiefdom. "I'm frightened!" Like those lines, the retreat in the middle of the film feels false and forced; it strains the already unstable tone by pushing it in a new and unlikely direction. The score -- which has gone from Avengers-esque spy riffs to gooey pop songs -- veers into schmaltzy strings as the couple grows closer, only to be rent apart when Victor's secret is revealed. By then all the life has left the film and even the performers start looking peaked. Audiences will find the finale and the flash-forward denouement about as wild as a speed bump in a parking lot, and perhaps even a little less fun.