Assassin presents itself as a sci-fi action B movie that is also the last one to be made with Bruce Willis due to his Aphasia and Dementia diagnosis. The concepts are admittedly interesting, but the execution so nonsensical and amateurish that even the interesting aspects grow frustrating.

The plot is rather confused at the beginning – a number of bewildered, angry people through which the film moves without explaining who these people are or what these events have to do with one another.  Eventually it is made clear that Alexa (South African actress Nomzamo Mbatha) is angry because her love(?) (I mean is he her boyfriend? Husband? Best friend?), Sebastian (Mustafa Shakir) is in a coma.  Turn out, he is (was?) part of a mysterious military (CIA? Corporate?) experiment to turn other humans into drones piloted by assassins.  Sebastian was a “drone” pilot, but his brains got scrambled – you don’t need an explanation, the film says, just go with it.  The one explanation of the technology is a bathtub with copper wiring allows the organization to “digitally map your consciousness into another person’s body” and turn that other person into an assassin.   Okay – horror and sci-fi has shown us a lot of body-swapping killers.  I’m following so far.

Adrian (Dominic Purcell) is the big bad, although we’re not sure why he stole the drone technology or what his big plan is.  He’s just there to bad guy around. Mali (Andy Allo), a singer who works for Adrian, is the drone piloted by Alexa in an attempt to retrieve the drone technology from Adrian and also kill him (I think – to be honest, the film often does not make sense or link its plot points). The characters are not really characters but dialogue tags who attempt to push what plot there is forward.  The music occasionally seemed to suggest that a major revelation or twist is occurring, but half the time, I’ll be damned if I know what it was. The whole thing may have been a plot by Sebatian.  Or not.  At this point I was scrolling on my phone.

There are a few moments of inspired cinematography, but they cannot rescue Assassin in any real way.  Many of Willis’s lines are just so much action movie word salad, and his overall performance is wooden and uninspired, which is a shame. It’s not very good storytelling, nor very good action or fights, and Bruce Willis deserved better. Frankly, so did most of the cast and anyone watching.