110 min | R | April 30, 2021 | Lionsgate
A nameless contract killer botches a job and gets handed a cryptic next target by his mentor. He stalks a small town diner trying to figure out which stranger he is supposed to shoot. The mystery is the only thing keeping the lights on, and it goes out early.
A hitman called only The Virtuoso kills people for money and narrates his own technique like a man reading from a manual. His latest job ends with collateral damage, so The Mentor sends him to a remote town with a vague clue and a deadline. The Virtuoso parks himself at a diner and works through the suspects, none of whom he can identify with certainty. The film wants to be a procedural about a craftsman applying his discipline under pressure. It is really a feature-length monologue that mistakes voiceover for character.
Anson Mount plays The Virtuoso with a granite blankness that the script confuses for control. He delivers reams of second-person narration about patience and precision, and the words never connect to anything happening on his face. Anthony Hopkins appears as The Mentor for one long scene in a chair, telling a war story that has nothing to do with the plot and everything to do with filling time. Abbie Cornish plays The Waitress as a function rather than a person, present mainly to advance a twist. David Morse plays The Deputy and Eddie Marsan plays The Loner, both circling the diner as suspects the movie never bothers to make interesting.
Nick Stagliano directs from a script by James C. Wolfe that buries the actors under constant narration. The voiceover explains the rain, the lighting, the breathing, and the mechanics of a kill, leaving the images with nothing to do but illustrate the words. The cinematography favors slate-gray neo-noir surfaces and wet streets that look borrowed from a hundred better assassin pictures. Stagliano stages the diner scenes with flat coverage and reaction shots that telegraph the mystery long before the reveal lands. The score underlines moods the dialogue has already named twice.
The Virtuoso treats its own emptiness as atmosphere. Every line of narration insists this is a precise machine built by a careful professional, and the movie never demonstrates the precision it keeps describing. Hopkins collects his scene and leaves, Mount stares, and the twist arrives with a thud you can see coming from the first act. This is a film about a master craftsman that shows no evidence anyone behind the camera shared his standards.