Directed by George Armitage, "Grosse Pointe Blank" stars John Cusack as Martin Blank, a neurotic hit-man who has spent the last ten years of his life stuck in an existential rut. As such, Blank spends most his time contemplating the meaning of life, reading magazines titled "making sense of creation" and brooding about the perceived pointless of all existence. If life has no worth, Blank muses, then why not profit from killing?
In true Woody Allen fashion, Blank discusses all these issues with his psychiatrist (played brilliantly by Allan Arkin). He's searching for some meaning, anything to fill a certain existential void, an emotional roller-coaster which Cusack has made a career out of conveying. Indeed, Cusack made a name for himself in the 1980s playing wisecracking teenagers who struggle with adulthood, are contemptuous of others and posses an inner wisdom. You might say "Blank" takes these characters and pushes them toward sociopathy.
Cusack has always been cool, but here he oozes ultra-cool, ever body motion, mannerism and gesture fine-tuned. The film offers an endless stream of witty dialogue, numerous neat, subtle touches (Blank is very picky about where he sits), a killer soundtrack and a hilarious subplot featuring Dan Aykroyd as a fast-talking, overweight hit-man. Aykroyd's attempting to set up a hit-man trade union ("Solidarity!"), but Blank's not interested in joining. The duo share a priceless scene in a café, both men with weapons hidden under a table.
Bizarrely, "Grosse Pointe" marries at least six genres. It's a high-school reunion movie, an assassin flick, a return-to-small-town movie, a romantic comedy, action film and 1980s teen nostalgia flick. Armitage handles the tropes of all these genres well, but outdoes himself with the film's many action sequences. They're surprisingly well choreographed, particularly an intense fist-fight with famed martial artist Benny Urquidez.
Much of the film plays like a 1980s, teen flick. Here Minnie Driver's the object of Blank's affection, she playing the girl Blank abandoned 10 years earlier at a high school dance. Blank's attempting to reconnect with her as a means of escaping what is essentially a stasis borne of nihilism and apathy, a fact which gives the film's eighties nostalgia some touching subtext. Blank wants to mend his childhood, to start over, but the universe won't let him. In the end, it's Driver who embraces Blank's philosophy, though Blank changes a little too. In one scene, holding a baby whilst Queen waffles on the soundtrack ("...dares you to change your way of caring...."), Blank learns something about the fragility and preciousness of life. Seconds later he kills a guy and dumps the body in a furnace. Baby steps.
The film's romantic climax is rushed and unconvincing, and Minnie Driver irks with the facial bone structure of a caveman. Still, "Grosse Pointe" is some kind of classic, and in a way continues the evolution of the hit-man genre (from Yojimbo to Le Samourai to The Professional (1980) to Nikita to Leon to Ghost Dog to Grosse Pointe Blank). Here, Cusack acts as a sort of deconstruction of the Hit-man. No longer is he an angel of death (Melville's film), or a mentally damaged human, but a totally self-aware, thoroughly postmodern, neurotic wreck. The film completely autopsies the genre, which will probably lead to a lot of noble, somber, "stable" and "righteous" hit-man movies in the future. Every genre's eventually reset.
9/10 – Cult classic. See "High Fidelity" and "Pump Up The Volume".
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