Dir: Gonzalo Lopez Gallego | Spain 107’ 2024
A stylishly slick but formulaic film sees Ian Mcshane (now 81) booted and suited in Fuerteventura as a soulful professional hitman called Wilson.
The canary island provides a suitably inhospitable widescreen backcloth for this curio that feels less and less like a thriller the more it plays out as a drama with some dark humour and a gently lilting score from Remate.
Wilson, a gravelly voiced tattooed war veteran, is there to do away with ‘the target’ who is not at home when he turns up at his swanky modernist villa to kill him. Instead a young French woman is swimming in the pool. So Wilson roams aimlessly about the moon-scaped island and ends up playing pool in a nearby bar and quaffing vintage whiskey served to him by said French girl (Nora Arnezeder) Gloria, who apparently works there and offers him lunch with her mother a wonderfully drole Fanny Ardant, who is no fool when she meets the suave silver fox.
Softening elements arrive in the shape of Wilson’s gauche and shaggy-haired sidekick Ryan (Adam Nagaitis) who turns up from Lancashire offering to help, instantly lowering the tone along with an irritating little boy called Max (Oscar Coleman) who hangs around the hotel. The American Star of the title turns out to be a vast and rusting shipwreck that provides a scary interlude when it starts creaking ominously in the waves.
The film showcases McShane’s talents as an affable and intuitive killer who knows how to charm the birds and the boys but can still be brutal when necessary. For once he gets a leading role and carries it off with style in director Gonzalo López-Gallego’s visually appealing offbeat thriller. @MeredithTaylor