Following professional assassin, Martin Blank’s return to his home-town of Grosse Pointe, Michigan on his 10-year high-school reunion weekend, the movie quickly covers his stalled love-life, his abandoned prom date, his mother’s dementia, and the redevelopment of his childhood home into a convenience store. All of this is dealt with by a mixture of humour, confession, sarcasm, and extreme violence with a soupçon of nostalgia to complete an unlikely recipe for what slowly turns out to be both a love story and one of spiritual development. Most of the violence is comic-book style and entertainingly gruesome – one martial arts sequence being a definite hinge-point for the story. There is a great 80’s soundtrack throughout, tied to Minnie Driver’s job as local radio DJ, which anchors the movie into a very specific feel and sound for those of us who were around in 1986. This really deserves to be better known, and is one of those films that bears rewatching over and over again. It’s funny, poignant (but never sentimental), reassuring and gruesome all at once – and you’ll never refuse the offer of a free promotional pen after watching it!


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