Who Knew Brosnan was so good?

With not much of a desire to see any particular movie, I ended up seeing "The Matador" tonight and honestly, I'm damn glad I did. "The Matador" is a darkly humorous buddy comedy about a chance meeting between an assassin entering a midlife crisis (Pierce Brosnan) and a salesman at the end of his rope and the end of his luck (Greg Kinnear). And while some of the ground the movie covers might seem familiar, in the end this tidy little flick might very well surprise you.

Brosnan's Julian Noble is a man who likes his booze, his women and his men who look like women. He also likes his job, which just happens to be facilitating the removal of particular people, as he once puts it. While on a job in Mexico City, he befriends a fellow barmate, Kinnear's Danny Wright. Wright is in Mexico to close a big deal that he hopes will break him out of his three year run of bad luck which began with a family tragedy and continued through to a household disaster the morning of his flight down to Mexico. Danny is at the bar that night celebrating what he thinks was a highly successful meeting earlier that day. What ensues is a disjointed conversation between the two that is highly humorous and fairly revealing. As they talk Danny reveals what haunts him and Julian reveals his own emotional delinquency.

The rest of the movie continues on from there including a terribly funny sequence at a bullfight where Julian is showing Danny exactly what he does for money. But the big turn is later on in the film several months later Julian shows up at Danny's house in the middle of the night, seemingly out of nowhere, desperate and needy. This is where Hope Davis as Danny's wife Bean steals every scene she's in. Her excitement at housing an assassin is unexpected, but truly fitting for the movie's tone. The chemistry between Davis, Kinnear, and Brosnan is at the same time easy and electric and I wish there had been a chance to see more of it. But since in essence this movie is more about the relationship between the two men and their chemistry was just perfect, you don't notice this desire till later.

As the movie rounds the bend, the main characters basically switch places; Julian falls apart and Danny is the strong and stable one. (Though to be fair, Julian was never stable) And as the tables turn, the friendship strengthens to the point where they are both on equal footing. This brings up both stated and implied questions of morality where one wonders how much assassin is in each of us when pushed to the limit. "The Matador" has its own notions of the answers to some of these questions and leaves the rest up to the audience.

After playing James Bond for the past few years, Pierce Brosnan seemed to settle into a comfortable smarminess. He is wonderfully freed from this stereotyping in this role. Whether strolling through a hotel lobby full of well-dressed businessmen while dressed only in a speedo, sunglasses and boots, breaking down in an abandoned stairwell, or seducing a young women with barely a wink, Brosnan embodies Julian Noble's highs, lows, and everything in between...you even forget that he once had to pretend Denise Richards was a physicist. It is perhaps a blessing in disguise that Daniel Craig is taking up the license to kill as now Brosnan will be free to explore the darker and more bizarre side of himself and caricature the rut he almost fell into.