Journal of a Contract Killer (2008)

Must See Movie...

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

This is truly how I welcome the cinema .. A story that has real world characters who have depth and soul... and knowing that it is based on a true story adds even further to the impact.The violence is portrayed in a meaningful manner, it is not glorified with typical Hollywood "drama", here it is cold, quick and without remorse...This is not a film that the mainstream media can love because it portrays the kind of reality that it far too heavy to immediately digest. It is in essence a philosophical/sociological view on the darker side of society.You can't just walk away from this film and forget it...

So I'm a huge watcher of movies. I've probably been going at a run rate of over 300 movies per year for the last several years. I enjoy assassin movies - who doesn't? I had relatively low expectations for this movie given the poor ratings here on IMDb. In general, I find that about 80% of the time I'm directionally aligned with IMDb scores, so I use them as a proxy for what I choose to watch, but sometimes the scores are just totally opposite of what my opinion is and I'm compelled to write a review. I haven't even written that many reviews and I only seem to be motivated enough to write them when I totally disagree with scores. Anyway, JOACK was much better than expected. The acting overall was done well. And while there were certainly aspects of the storyline that could have been better developed (such as the mother-daughter relationship), the overall storyline was quite good. Even if the acting seemed a little too flat sometimes, even for a cold-hearted killer-type movie, the dialogue and timing of the actors was done well, for the most part. I also liked the slight twists and turns of the story over all. In summary, I thought the movie, especially compared to how many bad movies are cranked out every year by Hollywood, was good and worth watching. I score it a solid 8, but give it a 9 here to try to offset the bad score average it has right now.

...Like the previous poster, I am at a loss why this film has such a low rating.Taut, well directed story telling of the highest order, featuring pretty well unknown actors.....by and large thats what we have here...actors...not 'stars' I would rather watch this a million times than have to watch some drippy Hollywood movie full of teens and explosions.Highly recommended to anyone who likes their films British and well acted.It's a new take on organised crime, and keeps enough of the kitchen sink (literally) element that marks all great British cinema, well worth a watch.

Well, let's just say that there was more life and entertainment value in the corpses than the actors doing the killing. This film needed a bigger budget than the £35 they seemed to have spent on this load of old cod's-wallop.This could have been a very, very good film, if only the director had had a clue to what he was doing, editing is all over the place, the sound track through out the movie was heavy handed and completely unnecessary in places.I think the biggest problem with this movie is that the majority of the dialogue is delivered in a manner of someone reading from idiot-boards, in a very dull monotone sort of way.The one bright spot in this movie was Jake Canuso who played Alessandro, a schizo mafia thug in the best tradition of movie mafia thugs. Good Job..Don't waste your time with this, it will only encourage them to make something else even more banal.You've been warned...