Jen Kornfeldt (Katherine Heigl) doesn’t believe that she will ever fall in love again after her current boyfriend dumps her. Consigned to life as a singleton, Jen reluctantly goes on holiday with her overly protective pilot father (Tom Selleck) and boozy mother (Catherine O’Hara) to the French Riviera where she meets handsome consultant, Spencer Aimes (Ashton Kutcher). Jen is instantly attracted to his washboard stomach and warm smile, and the couple enjoys a slightly drunken first date. Three years later, Jen is married to Spencer and happily settled in a close-knit community with white picket fences and kooky neighbours. Alas, Spencer has been keeping a tiny secret: he is an international spy and assassin, who retired from active duty but has now been marked for death.

To have and to hold…

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When Jen is caught in the middle of a gunfight, she finally realises the full horror of her situation as sidekick to a trained killer. “So what am I, Pussy Galore?” she shrieks. “Not that I know of,” retorts Spencer. “So now you’re complaining about our sex life?!” counters Jen angrily, her rosy future shattered to smithereens.

Pressure can be a killer

Killers is an odd mishmash of genres, veering wildly from action to comedy and back again, sometimes in a single scene. Kutcher and Heigl are far better than the screenplay, which reduces the former to shirtless eye candy and the latter to an unadventurous homemaker. Spencer tries to justify his interest in Jen by telling his handler, “She’s normal and I feel normal when I’m with her. I like that.” If he says so. On-screen chemistry simmers but never catches fire, extinguished almost entirely by the stunt-laden finale. Selleck twitches his fine moustache as the patriarch with secrets of his own and O’Hara is broad comic relief as a lush whose idea of ‘hair of the dog’ is a quart jug of extra strong Bloody Mary. With all of the explosions and sparks from ricocheting bullets, it’s a miracle she doesn’t go up in flames too.

Overall, it’s disappointment from almost every angle – Heigl deserves better than these fluffy non-parts, and Kutcher should know better after proving his worth in The Butterfly Effect. We’re willing to hope everyone involved has more to offer than Killers, as the only thing dying is our faith in the industry.

What did you make of Killers? Let us know…