Mike (Scott Adkins) is a hired killer whose specialty is making it look like his target either killed themselves, or suffered an unfortunate accident. He's part of a little outfit of killers, each with their own preferred methods, although he says one of the guys just picks names out of the phone book to use to test out new ideas. Such as band-aids laced with something that causes immediate anaphylactic shock.
He explained it, but I wasn't paying attention.
Mike learns one day that his ex-girlfriend was murdered. The police are labeling it as a break in by a couple of crackheads found o.d.'ed nearby, but Mike figures out it was a couple of the other guys in the outfit, and this is not OK. So then he has to know who paid to have her killed and it turns into a whole thing.
If, like me, you were asking why we should care that Mike lost someone he cared about (albeit someone who broke up with both because she realized she was bisexual and he was an asshole, and failed to at any point mention she was pregnant with his child, which she was going to raise with her new girlfriend), when he has been killing people for years, in some cases making the victims' loved believe they committed suicide, well, the movie itself raises that point. Michael Jai White plays one of the guys who killed Mike's ex, and he asks what the difference is.
The movie doesn't have a good answer. Mike keeps bringing up she was pregnant, but he found that out at her funeral during an unpleasant conversation with her girlfriend, so it isn't as though it was making much difference to him. Though his mentor (played by Ray Stevenson) notes Mike is going soft, and Mike doesn't disagree, at the end of the movie, Mike also makes a comment that, if he can't be a hired killer in this town, there are surely other towns that need a guy like him.
So he didn't even learn anything from the pain of losing his ex-girlfriend! There was no epiphany, no moral clarity. This was strictly a revenge style, "you touched my stuff," reaction. He's going to go right back to inflicting that same pain on other people because, essentially, he is too stupid (lazy, more likely) to bother to learn another trade.
Anyway, some of the fights are good, Adkins is athletic enough to do lots of tosses and spinning jump kicks and other flashy stuff. There's a lengthy flashback to his teenage years that explains how he met Stevenson's character and became a hitman*. It feels awkwardly placed in the story and mostly acts as padding, but I imagine the idea was to highlight the relationship between the two and how it factors into the story from that point on. I'm not sure it was necessary, though.
* Sorry, assassin. Apparently "hitman" is some stupid Yank term, according to Ray. In England they're "assassins". That feels like the sort of thing Ennis would have mocked for a few pages in Hitman before Tommy Monaghan blew some guy's head off.
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