Colour me Gunther-whelmed

There is obviously a point in every actor’s life where they take on projects that ordinarily they wouldn't touch with a barge pole. Maybe the mortgage is overdue, maybe the alimony payments increased, maybe their usual coke dealer suddenly upped his overheads for some reason or other; it's hard to say. Those same reasons probably account for why producers green light certain projects in the first place. Either that or threats abound of some pretty grim Polaroids making their way to Hollywood inboxes. I can only assume that's how 90% of the straight-to-DVD section in ASDA got made.

Arnold Schwarzenegger is a personal hero of mine and the man is a legend both on and off screen it would seem. OK, yes there were some indiscretions with a housemaid that were probably not a highlight, but he made some of the best action movies not just of the 80s and 90s but of all time; scientifically proven fact. Predator, Conan, Total Recall, Running Man, Red Heat, Raw Deal, Terminator and not least arguably the King of Action movies Commando. Even True Lies, Eraser, End of Days and Collateral Damage are decent fun. There is a sort of trend in my head though, that his comedies fall way short of the mark. I didn't like Twins or Kindergarten Cop (although people swear blind that both of those are great movies) and Jingle All The Way was not great. By which I mean crap. There's always the faint glimmer of hope though, which is why when I saw his heavily Photoshopped face beaming at me from behind a Beretta on the cover of a DVD I thought I'd take a punt. Didn't turn out great.

Killing Gunther sort of looked a bit like Smokin' Aces except with The Austrian Oak but it ended up being something quite a considerable amount less good than even. Actually, that isn't fair on Smokin' Aces, I quite enjoyed that. It's actually one of those mockumentary type movies where a hapless crew follows a team of assassins as they try to off the titular hitman so they can prove they're the best. The problem is that considering this is supposed to be an action/comedy it kind of fails dismally to do either with any sort of success whatsoever.

Arnie's greatest success is basically being able to pull off being a giant human being with a weird accent and slender grasp of actual acting who genuinely looks like he could fight his way through and entire army single-handedly. That and his ability to rattle off one-liners like literally no other. It is therefore probably not the best use of his time and likely sizeable fee to have him only appear in the final 17 minutes of your thankfully short movie. The preceding hour is filled with a predictable series of clichés; we get introduced to the team members, a series of botched attempts to track down and kill Gunther and premature celebrations as the team get themselves dispatched one by one by the greatest hitman ever. At some point we find out the real reason the protagonist has beef is because the ex he's still in love with left him for Gunther but frankly at that point I had given as many shits as I was prepared to. None of it strikes a chord; the assassins themselves are broad strokes characters at best; explosive guy, poison guy who talks like a snake, psychotic Russian Twins with a Disney fixation, female Israeli sniper with an over-possessive Dad. They just aren't funny. There's a distinct feeling that if this had been a sketch on Saturday Night Live it might have been OK at best, but drawn out over an hour and a half it's just painful.

The other side of the coin falls flat too. Clearly they spent a vast proportion of the budget on Arnie and Coby Smulders' salaries so the set pieces just about make it to OK. I'm not usually one to call out the blurb on the back of the box, but when promised all out action, I would at least expect something approaching that rather than the weak sauce on offer here. They seriously need to fire their Photoshop guy though, I've done better myself using the 'remove background' tool in Microsoft PowerPoint. Genuinely, it does get a touch better when Arnie finally makes an appearance but only slightly; even his superstar pedigree can't save this from flopping horribly like a multi-millionaire basketballer.

This movie makes no sense for Arnie to be in. He's horribly under-used (possibly because that's all they could afford) and his dialogue amounts to not much more than re-hashes and throwbacks to his previous glory. There's a Terminator reference, a Total Recall reference and when he escapes on a helicopter there is of course a reference to him getting to the choppah. The script is so desperate to be clever that it overlooks actually being so, unless perhaps you happen to be a teenage boy or have been in a coma since 1996 and are waking up to find out Dutch Schaeffer became Governor of California and is now just as well known for taking pot-shots at Presidents on both sides of the political spectrum as he is for being Mr Universe 47 years in a row (or whatever it was). It's so cringe-inducing I'm surprised he even looked at it twice, let alone happily signed up for it. 

It's baffling to me, how projects like this get off the ground and get enough traction to actually draw in someone with Arnie's clout. This is a man who turned down the new Predator movie let's remember and although the jury is still way out on that, compared to Killing Gunther they could show graphic footage of a Predator taking a fluorescent green shit for 2 hours and it would probably top this. It's beginning to seem like this is what happens to aging action stars: you don't die, you just end up in a series of cheaper and cheaper straight-to-DVD crapfests until you go the great Nakatomi Tower in the sky. It happened to Seagal, Van Damme, and Bruce Willis and now it's got Arnie. Nic Cage has made an entire career out of it though, so maybe it isn't as bad as it seems, but it's a stark warning to the Rock of what the future may hold...