Triggermen (2002)

Best movie of this year hands down!

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Unfortunately a waste of time. It might have worked in Ireland. I hoped at the start it might have at least the charm, if not the first class humor of say, the wonderful innocents turned Hit-men, "I Went Down". But there is no joy in this bottle.With a much too scrumptious cast for it's left-over script; this film squanders Postlethwaite, Rappaport, Saul Rubinek and Amanda Plummer all of whom have been put to wonderful use by director/writer combos with actual talent.But when you take two leads from years of unremarkable TV success and team them with the (in this case) unwatchable Donnie Wahlberg (no longer the New Kid on anyone's block), all costumed in outfits that must be from dumpster diving (and I may be being too harsh on the possibilities of found clothing), all sleep walking through sets more budget hunted and painful to look at than the unfolding of the plot...And you have an thoroughly un-enjoyable waste of 2 hours. I would have liked to have been able to find even one great moment or turn of the proverbial page, but, I do a service to all by saying... Save your time and move on.

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.

John Bradshaw's "Triggermen" deserved a bigger audience. Judging by the comments submitted to this forum, it must have been a film that went directly to DVD, because obviously it was abandoned to its fate by the distributors. Mr. Bradshaw shows he can produce films that keep the viewer entertained and because he gets good performances from his cast. The film was written by Tony Johnson.The main interest for watching "Triggermen" was to see Adrian Dunbar and Neil Morressey, who are excellent actors. They play a pair of English low lives who have come to Chicago in search of easy schemes, but they haven't been lucky. That is, until Pete, stumbles upon an case that contains money and a photograph of someone who has to be eliminated. His solution is to take advantage of the situation, move with Andy from the seedy place they are staying into the posh hotel that has been reserved for the would be killer.This pair gets much more than what they bargained for. Little do they know they have double crossed the real pair of executioners. The film is a comedy of errors that delivers a lot because of the mistaken identities. Since one knows who is who, there is no suspense because one realizes where the film is going.Pete Postlewaite, one of the best English character actors, appears as the retiring mafia don, Ben Cutler, who is staying in the hotel with his lovely daughter. Claire Forlini is a gorgeous woman to look at, and as Emma, the daughter, she becomes the object of love for one of the real assassins, Terry, who falls in love with her. These other duo, played by Donnie Wahlberg and Michael Rapaport, are good in most of their scenes together.Let's hope John Bradshaw will be back soon with another film where he will be recognized for his obvious talent.

This film had a particularly good cast (kudos to Adrian Dunbar and Donnie Whalberg) and then proceeded to waste them disgracefully. Could have been, and should have been, a riotous farce. It had all of the classic elements. Incompetent villains, mistaken identity, money, pretty girl, et al, but sadly was slow, boring, and crucially, not funny.Still, nice to see Neil Morrissey, stalwart of endless British TV series, getting a shot at international exposure. It is just a shame that this was not a better vehicle for his undoubted comic talents.Major complaint! Where the hell was the babe, wearing the stars and stripes bikini, cuddling up to Adrian Dunbar in the Jacuzzi on the British poster? Now, she would have been worth the price of admission on her own!