In short: Asher (2018)

Asher (Ron Perlman) is a professional killer. You know the kind – aging, tired, sad, lonely apart from a handful of professional contacts, and not without regrets for his life decisions. His life just might take the kind of surprising upturn few people of his age get, when he killer-meet-cutes Sophie (Famke Janssen), a woman with some baggage herself and a mother (Jacqueline Bisset) suffering from dementia.

But as these films go, a strategic mistake in his professional life sets Asher on a collision course with one of his former friends and associates (Richard Dreyfuss), and some too ambitious plans the killer doesn’t know about get most of the rest of said associates killed, so his newfound hope for an actual human life just might come too late and be rather deadly for Sophie.

On paper, Michael Caton-Jones’s Asher is nothing special. We’ve seen its plot and variations thereof a hundred times before and its central characters are just as well-worn (though kudos for Sophie not being blind). However, in practice, there’s something pretty special about the whole affair. In part, the film’s considerable amount of actual human pathos is won by a cast and director whose careers have reached a trajectory quite parallel to Asher’s, a late middle to final phase that doesn’t fit comfortably with anyone, and the least with consummate professionals in a business that favours youth over talent and experience any day, as much as you try to mutilate yourself with botox and whatever other nonsense’s the flavour of the day.

It’s not all self-pity and doom and gloom here, though. Instead there’s a relaxed quality to quite a bit of the film, a willingness to stay with characters and care for them when other films would make haste to the next plot point. But then, we know the plot very well indeed, so fixating on it would be quite beside the point, especially when caring for what’s going on with the characters is a lot more rewarding.

Part of Asher’s special quality in this regard is how clearly it applies actual lived experience to the genre tropes it uses, providing the film with palpable humanity where it could get away with going through the motions. The actors clearly share in the film’s approach here, and they all, especially Perlman, Janssen and Bisset, seem to put a lot of themselves into what we are seeing.


There are also some fine, homage-heavy scenes of professional killer business, a dry yet warm sense of humour and low-key eccentricity as a way to give standard plot beats more life to enjoy here, turning this into quite a different film from the would-be post-Tarantino thing I expected Asher to be going in.