Mjeteconer Just perfect...

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated

Lollivan It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

hasosch The problem of Henri Boulanger is similar to that of Odysseus who told his friends to tighten him up at a pole of his ship before they drive through Scylla and Charybdis, and, to never obey him if he asks them to loose the ties, because otherwise he will be lost for either of the two monsters. In the case of Henry Boulanger it is so that this sober, never-drinking, never womanizing Kafkaesque office-worker suddenly looses his job, when the company wants to shrink. Boulanger, who never had tasted the sweet delirium of alcohol and the seductive odor of cigarettes, does not know a catalytic spirit of auxiliary constructions that would help him over the shock of having lost his job. So, he does what nobody else would do in his situation: he hires a contract killer. However, shortly after having paid the sum to kill himself, he enters a bar where they do not sell tea, so, for the first time, under the horizon of his life coming to a soon end, he drinks whiskey after whiskey, learns how good this is for him and smokes cigarette after cigarette, greedily trying to catch up what he had missed his whole life. There, in the bar, he meets Margaret, his first and therefore biggest love of his life. Clearly, having tasted the real fruits of life, he does not want to die anymore. But how can he make his killers clear that he want to withdraw from his contract? While Odysseus stays cuffed on his pole, Boulanger errs lost like Odysseus through London.

unnatural_habitat Aki Kaurismäki, like all true film auteurs, creates worlds. Not in the sci-fi fantasy sense — though, I am not excluding sci-fi, merely broadening the concept — but in the subjective sense. Like Jarmusch, Fassbinder and Lynch, you get a feeling while watching a Kaurismäki movie that you are watching something highly personal. And so it goes with his odd and amusing love story, I Hired a Contract Killer, about a man who wants to kill himself but reconsiders after falling in love.Roll your eyes and say you've seen that kind of movie before, but with Kaurismäki at the helm you get something genuinely touching, without forced pathos, incidental-music, or faux-inspirational endings. Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, the French nouvelle vague star of such movies as American Night and 400 blows, IHCK moves us from Kaurismäki's usual film location in Helsinki to London. Like the down-and-out squalor of Kaurismäki's working class neighborhoods in Helsinki, the London depicted here isn't the refined upper-class cosmopolis depicted in Woody Allen's latest movies, rather it's a drab, trash-strewn working class London full of thugs and hard-drinking wage slaves.Jean-Pierre is plays Frenchman named Henri, who was spent the las 15 years of his life working for the same boring English company. Because of financial difficulties, his job has become redundant, and "foreigners" are the first ones to get the ax. Distraught — for his rote day job was the only thing that kept him from self-reflection — Henri decides to kill himself. He attempts to hang himself, fails when the rope snaps; so he tries to gas himself, but a gas strike that day leaves him without gas. The next day he reads an article about hit men operating in the city, and decides to hire a hit-man to do the job.He finds a lowdown bar in the roughest part of London and ridiculously goes to the bar and orders a ginger ale, much to the derision of the roughnecks around him. He announces, in his strong French accent, that "where I come from, veee eeet people like you for breakfast". This seems to calm suspicions. He finally meets the underworld boss and hires a contract killer.He spends the next hours anticipating his imminent death by constantly looking over his shoulder and providing clues for the hit-man to find him. One such clue is a note on his front door, indicating that he has gone out for a pint in the bar across the street. The very night that the hit-man is about to finish his job, he meets Margaret, a young women selling roses, and — in typically quirky Kaurismäki fashion — immediately falls in love. After barely evading the hit-man that night, he decides to call off the job. So he goes back to the bar from where he hired him, and, rather hilariously, it has burned down.This is probably the most Hitchcockian Kaurismäki has ever gotten, but it's an amusing and suspenseful plot device. Henri and Margaret spend the rest of the movie one step ahead of the hit-man, moving from her small apartment to a hotel, and finally with Henri going on the lamb when he finds himself unfairly implicated in a neighborhood hold up. Much like the characters in Jarmush's Down by Law, Henri becomes an innocent man with just about everybody against him — and, like Jarmush, Kaurismäki manages to make all his characters endearing and subtly humorous. This great mashup of an absurd, Kafka-esquire world, nearly-Hitchcockian suspense, and gentle humor, make this a not just a gangster movie parody, or a run-of-the mill love story, but truly, a movie with heart.

Roger crunch Great movie. Based on the story by Jules Verne Les Tribulations d'un chinois en Chine, Kaurismaki surprise us again with his strange humorous style. A story about feelings in an inexpressive way; don't mind how blue you can feel, there's always a place for love and hope. People and their contradictions; a man who don't want to live, contracts a killer who don't want to die. If you have seen any Kaurismaki's films, you should know that they are different; His way of filming and his stories are not "normal" in the commercial way; he seems to keep the distances with the characters, and that could be annoying for some people; but if you like it, you will love all his films. Kaurismaki is a genius, and he is funny too.

helmore I watched a documentary about Aki Kaurimaki (one of my favourite directors) in which he stated that he was sick and tired of pages and pages of dialogue he had written ending up on the cutting room floor. So he keeps the dialogue to a minimum. This film is a perfect example of this philosophy. This is Kaurismaki's trademark. Anyone who has seen "Leningrad Cowboys Go America" or "Arial" will recognise his sparing use of dialogue rather than having characters speak just for the sake of speaking. It is no wonder that his most recent film "Juha" was a silent film.This is a very dark and very realistic film about loneliness and depression. All the main characters in the film are lonely people, with very little to live for. Anyone who liked Tom Di Cillo's "Johnny Suede" will find that this is a very film to "I hired a Contract Killer". Personally, I loved this film and would highly recommend it to anyone with an appreciation for fine art house cinema.