The setting is high-rise with a huge law firm on an upper floor. A name partner (Christian Clemenson, fine as always) has two big clients overwhelming his staff as the movie opens: Denning Pharmaceutical, fighting a crippling lawsuit; and Mrs. Gambizzi, a Mafia wife turned snitch. The action takes place in the course of about 24 hours. After the office closes, while Mrs. Gambizzi is quietly meeting with Mr. Name Partner, an assassin heads into the high-rise building. Simply called The Killer, he is played with mesmerizing menace by JJ Feild- - a British actor who hasn't gotten anything like the attention, or roles, he deserves.
The Killer is not happy to discover that the office isn't quite as empty as he'd been lead to believe. As he coolly disables the elevator and outside access, he has to execute several people. As he wheels one body off in a handy ergonomic chair, he phones someone and speaks in ambiguously specific terms about the head count: "Three, plus the one we talked about."
The audience is not really left to wonder which of the four corpses is "the one," because it's easy to assume that Mrs. Gambizzi was the target of a mob vendetta.
But was she the target? In what I think is a very clever twist, that question raises the film well above the gangster level. The Killer has an opponent, a young paralegal (Max Minghella) who had been fired that very day, but, on his way out of the building with his box of belongings, he observed a suspicious briefcase-hand-off in the lobby, so he turned around and followed the suspicious recipient back up to the law offices. A quick-thinking, quick-moving young man, he is the solid center of this tense and tightly constructed thriller, which has more than a few moments when BAM! an edit jolts you in your seat, which the music has kept you at the edge of.
Director Joe Johnston and the writers (Adam Mason and Simon Boyes) leave enough unsaid to allow the audience to begin to wonder if the relentless, cold-blooded Killer really was sent by the Mafia, or was it the other client, Big Pharma? And when that knife-edge question dawns on you, the tension is suddenly, thrillingly doubled because you're faced with this question: which of those two entities is more powerful and dangerous?
The Killer is not happy to discover that the office isn't quite as empty as he'd been lead to believe. As he coolly disables the elevator and outside access, he has to execute several people. As he wheels one body off in a handy ergonomic chair, he phones someone and speaks in ambiguously specific terms about the head count: "Three, plus the one we talked about."
The audience is not really left to wonder which of the four corpses is "the one," because it's easy to assume that Mrs. Gambizzi was the target of a mob vendetta.
But was she the target? In what I think is a very clever twist, that question raises the film well above the gangster level. The Killer has an opponent, a young paralegal (Max Minghella) who had been fired that very day, but, on his way out of the building with his box of belongings, he observed a suspicious briefcase-hand-off in the lobby, so he turned around and followed the suspicious recipient back up to the law offices. A quick-thinking, quick-moving young man, he is the solid center of this tense and tightly constructed thriller, which has more than a few moments when BAM! an edit jolts you in your seat, which the music has kept you at the edge of.
Director Joe Johnston and the writers (Adam Mason and Simon Boyes) leave enough unsaid to allow the audience to begin to wonder if the relentless, cold-blooded Killer really was sent by the Mafia, or was it the other client, Big Pharma? And when that knife-edge question dawns on you, the tension is suddenly, thrillingly doubled because you're faced with this question: which of those two entities is more powerful and dangerous?