Dual choreography of mistrust

Rating: 9/10 (7 April 2006)

I saw this movie today on its screen debut in southern CA and enjoyed it quite a bit! It had just about everything in a film that I enjoy. Mystery and suspense, serious intent, well-written plot, contemporary thematic backdrop, the action handled with finesse and portrayed with meaningful direction, all intelligently support this brilliant and well-paced thriller. Most of all, I thoroughly enjoyed the finely crafted juxtaposition of how the weak can lead the strong through the exposure and effacement of pride that ultimately leads to downfall.
The film contains two sets of adversaries in a dual choreography of mistrust. That is between the two once friendly but now wealthy strong men and the uneasy truce established between the nemeses hired guns. The two strong men have erected individual decades-old barricades to protect themselves from each other in an upscale New York City setting. However well constructed, their defensive fortifications remain proverbial gilded cages. In the case of the two adversarial protagonist strong men (Morgan Freeman vs. Ben Kingsley), the simple catering to the respective egos and weaknesses of these two mortal enemies by the antagonist sheep (Hartnett & Willis) proves to be their undoing. The protagonist's rush to judgment over each other's calculating chess maneuverings (nice theatrically visual centerpiece as well) was symbolic of misplaced pride that prevented them from seeing the real truth. This eventually leads to mutual demise. Oddly tragically Elizabethan as it is reminiscent of how pride and misplaced trust proved to be the complete undoing of Othello.
The gradual unfolding of multifaceted objectives ran a nice undercurrent throughout the character development and sustained the central plot with retro-activity well. I see experimentation in circularity of plot implemented in other films these days and consider this a nice twist to the common (yet still good) linear plot approach.
Although throughout the film emphasis is placed on mistrust, of which there are two flavors; namely overt and evident as between the primary adversaries (Freeman & Kingsley), and covert and unspoken as between the secondary (Hartnett & Willis), there does appear to be an attempt to convey a moral to the story. So what I got out of this film in this area was: there is a lesson to be learned regarding revenge and mistrust; that is that no matter how sweet revenge, retaliation, vengeance, or retribution may be, its only result can be bitterness. Attendant mistrust (established or uneasy) can lead only to a cul-de-sac of cascading and spiraling mistrust, never to full satisfy. Therefore, one needs an honest and open relationship, and in this case it presents itself in the promising relationship with the love interest character (a Coroner portrayed by Lucy Liu). This apparent relationship with innocence is necessary in order to break away from the dark side.
Thus, the inescapable and magnetic love-at-first sight attraction between the younger assassin (Hartnett) and Lucy Liu. Although a youthful Willis character early on exhibited the ability to refrain from murdering a child displaying how he wasn't completely jaded, he has been in the assassination business for so long, he knows nothing else and is too far-gone. But there is hope for the younger assassin. This is reminiscent of the dilemma of the jaded assassin in the comedy "Matador" between the Pierce Brosnan assassin character and Greg Kinnear. If one waits too long, they become jaded in the only thing they trust: revenge; served up nice, cold and basically not shareable. However, Willis' and Hartnett's characters are ultimately killers themselves in a film that exhibits no clear good or bad guys in a world filled with only gray matters which ruins, I believe, the potential for serving up poetic justice.
Since I'm a romantic, I especially liked the allegory of how the strength of love was portrayed as having the ability to be a more powerful force than the satisfaction derived from the expectation and execution of patient revenge for unjustified murder and the subsequent halting trust established between two hit men with an uncomfortable and eventually untenable, lifelong agreement.