The action comedy with romantic undertones has been a staple part of the cinematic diet for years, and it’s thrown up a number of all-time greats and fan favorites in the process. At the other end of the spectrum, though, exist movies like 2010’s Killers.
Pairing a couple of well-known stars together and plunging them into a breakneck adventure that tends to revolve around either a case of mistaken identity or a mysterious MacGuffin has served the industry well through the likes of Romancing the Stone, True Lies, Knight and Day, The Lost City, Out of Sight, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, The Mask of Zorro, and plenty more besides, but that’s not what you get from Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl in director Robert Luketic’s tedious misfire.
The stars play a married couple living a seemingly idyllic existence, until it transpires that he’s been leading a double life as an elite-level spy, forcing the pair to try and stay alive while maintaining their suburban facade. It’s familiar, formulaic, and not very good, with an embarrassing 10 percent Rotten Tomatoes score making that perfectly clear.
And yet, frothy frolics are nigh-on impossible to turn down for streaming subscribers, which goes a long way to explaining why a critical disaster and commercial failure has ended up as one of the most-watched titles on Netflix’s global viewership charts, per FlixPatrol. There are countless similar – and infinitely better – films available on-demand, but for whatever reasons Killers has become the go-to destination for customers seeking to waste 100 minutes of their lives.