Full of sus­pense­ful set-pieces involv­ing assas­si­na­tion, The Mata­dor is a genre film on the sur­face. It’s actu­ally more of a char­ac­ter piece about one man about to pay the price for a life­time of being a patho­log­i­cal loner (para­dox­i­cally, while indulging his lusts in every other way imag­in­able), and another grasp­ing at his last chance to save both his pro­fes­sional and fam­ily lives.

Pierce Bros­nin lets it rip as Julian Noble, a sleeze­bag assas­sin with a Mag­num P.I. mus­tache. Inter­est­ingly, he fre­quently boasts of his bisex­u­al­ity, but we only see him hav­ing sex onscreen with women. The is-he-or-isn’t-he ambi­gu­ity actu­ally comes into play regard­ing an impo­rant plot point resolved near the very end of the film. Even bet­ter, the plot informs char­ac­ter, which is some­thing of a rarity.

Hope Davis’ char­ac­ter defies cliché by enjoy­ing a gen­uinely sex­ual rela­tion­ship with her hus­band, but is also more openly seduced (in a pla­tonic man­ner) by the exotic allure of an assas­sin. Per­haps Julian has lost any James Bond-like sex­ual allure he may have had, but dis­cov­ers he can make peo­ple like him by sim­ply reveal­ing what he does for a living.

Dis­ap­point­ingly, the movie ends rather cheesily, with Julian find­ing some human­ity deep inside his depravity.

•