A Film Canon

For the most part, assassin films subsume action into observation - and the strength and weakness of Assassins is that it takes this tendency about as far as it will go, approaching something more like cyber-romance. As veteran assassin Robert Rath, Sylvester Stallone's exquisite, melancholy alienation boils down to the fact that he receives all his instructions by computer, and only ever looks anyone directly in the eyes when he's about to kill them. In other words, a fleeting, direct sightline is the closest Rath comes to intimacy, meaning that when rival assassin Miguel Bain (Antonio Banderas) starts to intercept his hits, his alienation becomes unbearable, catapulting him into a protective relationship with a target - or, perhaps more accurately, the pair of eyes on a target's hacktivist website. What ensues is a love triangle that only really makes sense when the characters are communicating remotely, waiting breathlessly for each other to appear, or at least when they're relegated to separate frames. Although they've largely disavowed it, it's very much in keeping with the Wachowski brothers' later screenwriting, especially in the way that it effeminises cyberspace, or glimpses it as the languorous, trip-hop sensuality of a love triangle between three women, bringing Sly closer to Van Damme's lipsticked musculature than at any other point in his career. All in all, it's probably the closest Sly's come to noir too, if only because if it's the prospect of exactly this ambient, free-floating, contagious effeminacy that causes noir such paranoid anxiety - and the disparity with Antonio Banderas' comic, hyperactive acting would be grating were it not the exact disparity between First Blood and Rambo II, giving the impression of Sly contemplating himself from a mournful, middle-aged distance, through a multitude of teary, glassy surfaces. As the moment at which the camera starts crying for its characters, or at which eye contact segues into IT contact, Assassins ultimately plays as a nascent internet dating narrative, or even a webcam romance - a cyberchamber in which the computer is not only a source of romantic possibility but a pet, or plaything in itself, shot through with the warm glow of anonymous love, the bar of soap left on a hotel pillow.