Some movies have a way of really frustrating me. You know, when you see the potential for coolness but the filmmakers do everything to make their film suck. There is barely any fun or excitement in a film like “Grosse Pointe Blank”. We meet some guy named Martin Blank, a rather nice guy who just happens to kill people for a living. He left Detroit ten years ago without telling anyone. He spent time working in the army and for the government, but now he’s a professional hitman who even has his own office and a secretary. He’s got problems too, so he’s seeing a psychiatrist. He’s also in conflict with another hitman, Grocer, the head of the union of killers. Blank doesn’t want to syndicate, and that pisses Grocer off, and he hires a bunch of killers to off Blank. But our hitman is leaving the region to go back home for his tenth year high school reunion, so the assassins will have to follow him to Grosse Pointe.

This is actually an interesting premise. Unfortunately, the screenplay is a series of lame black comedy and boring conversations. Blank spends the whole film whining, and the dialogue is mostly uninteresting. There’s no humor, no personality, just these characters who think they’re hip but are so not. That’s probably what I hated the most about this movie. The people behind it seem to have seen “Pulp Fiction” and decided that they too could do a cool hitman flick. But this is light years from Tarantino territory. It’s a conventional studio picture that tries to rip off the spirit of independent filmmaking but fail miserably. They imitate Tarantino, but they get it all wrong.

Okay, they cast people we wouldn’t normally see as hitmen: John Cusack is Blank, and Dan Aykroyd is Grocer. Cusack is a gifted young actor, but he’s no Travolta. As for Aykroyd, he sucks so much! Then the producers put together a soundtrack full of cool songs, but instead of using tunes that fit the film, they just crammed a bunch of 80s it together. Like, I dig Violent Femmes’ Blister in the Sun, but if you’re gonna use it in a movie, don’t just stick it in one of those so deja vu joe-cool-driving-around-while-listening-to-music scenes! Another thing that sucks : the film is way too tame. The few shoot-outs are way too clean and generic. Don’t waste precious time watching this. You deserve better.