Ladies and gents, the first sure-fire awards contender of 2010 has landed! It’s called Killers and it’s going to take the Golden Raspberries by storm.

If you thought the similarly themed Knight and Day was bad, wait till you see this vacuous spy comedy from The Ugly Truth director Robert Luketic. Killers sees Luketic take a desperate swing at genre after genre in a hope he might eventually strike it lucky, but he does so with the dexterity of a blind swordsman suffering from an inner-ear infection.

The film begins in rom-com territory where the recently single Jen (Katherine Heigl) bumps boobs with the glistening pecks of hunky consultant Spencer (Ashton Kutcher) while holidaying in Nice, France. The two apparently hit it off, but what Jen doesn’t know is that Spencer is really a secret CIA agent finishing up an assignment. Lucky for Jen, it turns out he’s been on the hunt for someone as exceedingly tedious as she is to hang up his gun and bunker down with. Fast forward three years and Spencer and Jen are married, living deep in suburbia and leading a seemingly normal, unexciting life.

Finally, after an hour of painfully dull screenwriting that climaxes with a fart joke, the action plot decides to kick in when Spencer’s best friend unexpectedly tries to stab him (don’t you hate it when they do that?). Before long, most of their neighbours are revealed to be killer assassins, each competing against one another to terminate Spencer. So why does everyone want him dead all of a sudden? Who is the mastermind behind this dastardly assassination plot? And who in their right mind could honestly believe that Ashton Kutcher – the dude who could barely find his car ten years ago — is an elite spy?

One might compare this to the infinitely superior True Lies, but Killers feels more like it has been cobbled together using binned outtakes from the mediocre-but-tolerable Mr. and Mrs. Smith. At the very least, that film stayed afloat thanks to the strong chemistry – on screen and off — between Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. Here, Heigl and Kutcher’s romance has about as much crackle as a bowl of soggy Rice Bubbles. It doesn’t help that  Luketic is clearly inexperienced at directing action scenes, all of which fall victim to lazy staging and chaotic camerawork. There’s something to be said about the fact that I was more unsettled than entertained by the totally humourless ways Luketic violently slaughters off the assassins, perhaps because moments earlier these people were masquerading as Spencer and Jen’s closest friends. Maybe the film was initially vying for a darker, more solemn Truman Show vibe before it made a last minute jump on the action-comedy bandwagon?

Pfft, who am I kidding. Bad movie just bad.

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