Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Ok... Let's be honest. It cannot be the best movie but is quite enjoyable. The movie has the potential to develop a great plot for future movies

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

"The Matador" is an entry from Leonard Maltin's book "151 Best Movies You've Never Seen" and after running out of suggestions for what to watch on Netflix, I've used the book to find some excellent lesser-known pictures. However, "The Matador" is one suggestion I could have done without. Now I am not saying it's a bad film....but it really didn't do enough to make me glad I saw it. The movie involves an odd relationship between a screwball assassin (Pierce Brosnan) and ordinary businessman (Greg Kinnear). They have absolutely no reason to like each other nor spend time together...yet, inexplicably, you are expected to believe that they somehow become friends. And, when the hitman loses his mojo and find he can no longer kill, his new odd best friend helps him relearn the love of killing in order to keep himself employed and alive.So much of the film makes little sense. Sure, the story is original. but if you cannot believe anything you see, it makes a very tough sell...and it just didn't work for me. In addition, I often found the film unnecessarily crude and nasty...and I just had trouble connecting to it.

I can't list this movie as one of my favorite movies but it does have two of my favorite actors reminding me why they are. I have always loved Pierce Brosnan as far back as Remington Steel. I feel he was robbed of the James Bond gig in his prime but was still glad when he finally was cast as 007. I have found Greg Kinnear to be a most versatile actor. He really has a true range. If he was a singer he would be Mariah Carey in her heyday.I did not find this move to be action packed but what it lacked in action it made up for in content. I truly enjoyed the friendship these men had. I also can understand the way their friendship developed and feel that in the given circumstances anyone could end up following the same sequence of events.I did not like this movie enough to watch it again alone but I would watch it with someone else so that they could experience both the interesting story line and two great actors working together to offer a quality product.

Everybody needs friends or some sort of friendship to go through things in this life. As said in "It's a Wonderful Life" one can't be considered a failure if he or she has a friend. With this philosophy in mind what would think of a hit-man who has difficulties in making friends and needs to find one? What kind of trouble he would have? This is the dilemma of Julian (Pierce Brosnan) while visiting Mexico where he has a target to kill but instead he meets Danny (Greg Kinnear), an troubled salesman who's there for a business that can change his life after lots of failed business.This unlikely friendship is the basis of "The Matador", a film that discuss the importance of having friends even if people and their jobs have nothing in common. Somehow, the story will prove that these guys need each other to share values and experiences, and that everything might work out for them even that we could probably think that these guys are completely different from each other.Almost like "Analyze This", this comedy takes the cliché of an dangerous man who has a nervous breakdown that ruins his life and work, can't function at all and realizes that his life is a mess, he's not married, don't have friends and no place to stay, always traveling around the world to kill people. But he's an unpleasant man, very inconvenient, joking at the wrong time and always tries to involve Danny into his life of work. Confusion and trouble ahead!Treated as a comedy with a few action sequences, this is a good film but never hilariously funny. Has some good jokes (Brosnan dreaming of being a cheerleader) but that's it. If the writer was more clever he could have made of this an efficient thriller.The few thrilling sequences present here are shallow and inexcusable if we have to believe that Julian, a pro, really needs Danny to perform his last job, quoting that the other guy needs to distract the bodyguard of his target since the angle he has to execute his shooting doesn't allow him to do much. This moment is quite dumb,; a professional hit-man would find a way to do the job, even with a breakdown over his shoulders (and specially if knowing beforehand who is the target). The movie survives to this and some other flaws (it takes a lot of time to put these opposite forces together), delivers a good message, greatly presented and without being corny; the cast is really good, Brosnan is quite surprising and has some of the best lines of the movie along with Hope Davis (playing Kinnear's wife); and the soundtrack is brilliant with hits from The Jam, The Killers, Tom Jones and Asia.Helping or not, making us smile or not, that's what friends are for...even if the only one you have is a matador. 7/10

In a way this movie is being like the crime version of "Lost in Translation". It uses a very similar concept of a burned out, aging hit-man meeting an average Joe, in a foreign country and decide on spending their time together. It even somewhat uses the same approach of mixing comedy with serious drama. Not saying that this is a bad thing, or something that really matters but it was just a fun observation I made.The movie is still good and original to watch on its own though luckily. It's a movie with some hits and misses in it but overall I still consider it to be an above average one.The movie does feel a bit awkward at times with its comedy, that just seems to come and go within this movie. The one moment it's a real goofy movie to watch, while the movie mostly is still made in a very serious fashion and tone. But still it helps to make the movie pleasant and easy to watch. And this is a good thing, since it isn't exactly the movie its story that is being its strongest aspect.It's as if the director himself also didn't had really enough confidence in his own written script and tried to spice things up more with an over-stylized, hip, modern style that instead more often came across as too desperate and too wannabee. All of the sings of an inexperienced director but Richard Shepard actually isn't that inexperienced at all, which makes it odd that he really made some wrong choices at times with this movie.One thing that bugged me for instance was that we never saw the Pierce Brosnan character kill anybody in this movie, even though he does supposedly kill a whole bunch of people. Again, to me this was a sign that the director just didn't had enough confidence in either his script and actors. He must had been worried that we wouldn't care or sympathize with the Pierce Brosnan character if we saw him killing people in cold blood.And there absolutely was no reason for that, since it really are the actors that pull this movie and its story through. They do such a good job and I think I have to admit that I have never seen Pierce Brosnan act so well within a movie. He's very convincing and they also did a great job at aging him up. Yes, he of course was already in his 50's but he seems to be a guy that simply ever refuses to start to look old, until this movie came along, in which he really looks like a burned out guy, at an age when everything seems to go downhill for him from now on.So it really is far from a perfect movie, or a must-see but it's a good movie to watch if you happen to catch it on TV when nothing else is on. You probably won't regret watching it, despite of all of its flaws and weaknesses (such as also its editing, which I forgot to mention before) that are in it.7/10http://bobafett1138.blogspot.com/