 Pierce Brosnan has abandoned James Bond with a vengeance. In The Matador he plays a sleazy professional hit man having a mid-life attack of conscience. Stephen Holden in the New York Times suggests the movie has all the quality of a paperback page-turner, noting that since it "sustains a tone of screwball insouciance and keeps its trump card hidden up its sleeve, it must be counted as a well-made comic thriller. That doesn't mean it has any depth, credibility or artistic value beyond its capacity to divert." Claudia Puig in USA Today credits writer-director Richard Shepard for fashioning "a witty screenplay and well-drawn, compelling characters that feel plausible, despite the outlandish scenario." David Kronke in the Los Angeles Daily News calls it "a cult gem." But it is Brosnan who is receiving the most admiring notices from critics. Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News remarks: "Brosnan's smooth fit comes as both a shock and a pleasure. He obviously likes playing an engaging sociopath, and he's good at it." Gene Seymour in Newsday also is impressed by Brosnan's transition from Bond to his current character, Julian Noble. "Eventually, you forget Brosnan's ongoing effort to set fire to his trademark creased-and-polished image and begin to share his apparent glee in traipsing through this seriocomic farrago of crime melodrama, buddy movie and sob story," he writes. It is, writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times (his original review appeared during the Sundance Film Festival), "the best performance Pierce Brosnan has ever given." Likewise, Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times comments that Brosnan "turns in what might be considered the performance of his career, the kind of witty, relaxed star portrayals that recalls those of Cary Grant and other Golden Era legends." But Kyle Smith in the New York Post neither admires Brosnan's performance nor the movie itself, which she calls a "comedy thriller [that] has neither laughs nor thrills" and "makes Pierce Brosnan look so bad, figuratively as well as literally, that the film amounts to a charity appeal for his fading career." |
