Margaritas and Cock
     by Christian De Matteo

Super

I haven't been a big Pierce Brosnan fan, but then, that's probably because I've never really given a good, hot damn about the Bond series.  When everyone else is comparing spy movies, calling the lead characters "Poorman's James Bond", I've always felt Bond was his own "poorman's" spy flick.  The movies were okay (and, yes, Sean was the best one) but the concept is eternally dated in the sixties, the action gets sillier every time, and the plots, well, the plots are supposedly there.  I thought that my issue with Pierce, then, was his attached status to what I consider a walking dead serial.

When called upon to actually act (as opposed to being a womanizing spy, volcano fighter and art thief rehasher) Brosnan has truly risen to the occasion and, with the guiding of terrific direction and an excellent, nuanced and insightful script, Brosnan plays one of the best realized comedic characters I've seen in years.  In this film, Brosnan is called upon to be charming, not-charming, falsely charming, and badly charming, strong, funny, drunk funny, drunk serious, slightly insane, very insane, and terrified as a little boy who's quivering like a little girl.

And he does them all perfectly.

With a simple, clever plot of a hitman who meets a business man and strikes up a strange friendship as the hitman is beginning to burn out, the film moves swiftly and satisfyingly right through.  Every usual film comedy cliché from that point on is not only acknowledged, not only avoided, but completely re-invented for what is an extremely satisfying ending both on comedic levels and personal levels.

Here is a comedy we can care about, laugh about, find absurd, find wonderful and find truly, hysterical.  At the perfect time of an hour and half, the exact time a comedy should clock in at, everything tastes better in The Matador, not just the margaritas.