2.39:1 DVD capture: The Matador The Film

Wearing a sleazebag moustache and an ugly print shirt, Pierce Brosnan watches a bartender shake his drink instead of stirring it and the film slows down and blurs accordingly. It's post-modernism as gauzy, lazy hallucination--a swoon that suggests a minor, nearly-imperceptible tremor in reality and the only moment in which hyphenate Richard Shepard acknowledges the irony of the former 007's presence in another licensed-to-kill role as assassin-for-hire Julian Noble. Fond of bottomless tequila and "sucky-fucky" instead of "blushy-blushy," Noble is an unctuous, pathetic character--in any other film, he'd be selling office-furniture and drowning his sorrows in booze and floozies, wondering why nobody's calling on his birthday. On a fateful trip to Mexico, Julian intersects with Danny (Greg Kinnear), a suit-and-tie salesman trying desperately to secure an all-important contract so that his mousy wife (Hope Davis, cast against type as a kind person) doesn't droop into the wallpaper. A lightning-felled tree crashes through Danny's kitchen, no less a harbinger of calamitous change than Julian turning up on his doorstep months later with an offer Danny can't refuse. It's a comedy of murderous Freudian manners in the vogue of Grosse Point Blank or "The Sopranos": there's nothing particularly original about an odd-couple in a thriller nor, even, a thug having an existential crisis while involving Ward Cleaver in his maleficent deeds. The Matador, then, would do well to bring something new to the conversation, but instead, it functions as a workmanlike bit of easy entertainment. Neither challenging nor incompetent, the picture isn't courageous enough to fail and thus not courageous enough to be a masterpiece. It's a studiously inoffensive diversion for an audience of a certain age; for a shot of the real stuff, try Ripley's Game.-

Through Genius Products, The Weinstein Company presents The Matador on DVD in competing widescreen and fullscreen editions; we received the former for review. The 2.39:1, 16x9-enhanced transfer is by and large outstanding, but flesh tones are a bit on the jaundiced side, edge haloes come and go, and light print debris distracts during the all-important final scene. Maintaining fidelity to the original mix, the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is intermittently loud (to unnerve the viewer and thus create tension in the absence of suspense) and always ambient. Music, especially the closing song by The Killers, sounds phenomenal. On another track, writer-director Richard Shepard does an excellent job of contextualizing The Matador personally and professionally but effectively nullifies a second commentary that reunites him with Pierce Brosnan and Greg Kinnear by steering the mutually low-key actors towards topics already exhausted in his solo yakker. Though it was Brosnan who got the project off the ground, Kinnear emerges as its guardian angel in anecdotes that find him refusing to give a compromised version of the film his blessing and insisting on staging an unscripted "Reservoir Dogs" shot that wound up influencing The Matador's one sheet.

Shepard returns in two more or less redundant audio-only radio segments, the first of which, documenting Shepard's jitters in the hours prior to the film's world premiere at Sundance, instantly reminded me why I never listen to NPR, as magazine-style profiles read aloud sound weirdly affected (especially when they cut to a soundbite after a laborious set-up), like an episode of "The Shadow". Elvis Mitchell's Q&A with Shepard is more traditional and more informative besides, with the filmmaker admitting he wrote The Matador partly as a corrective to his previous film Mexico City, in which the titular locale got a really bad rap. Closing out the special features, "Making The Matador" (7 mins.) is an EPK circle-jerk, while eleven deleted or extended scenes (totalling 16 mins.)--with optional Shepard commentary--feel anticlimactic in light of how comprehensively they're discussed elsewhere on the disc. A trailer and TV spot for The Matador plus startup trailers for Transamerica, Hoodwinked, and The Libertine round out the platter.-

© Film Freak Central; filmfreakcentral.net. This review may not be reprinted, in whole or in part, without the express consent of its author.

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DVD VITALS:
Running Time
97 minutes
MPAA
R
Aspect Ratio(s)
2.39:1 ONLY, 16x9-enhanced
Languages
English DD 5.1
CC
Yes
Subtitles
Spanish
DVD-9
Region One
Weinstein/Genius

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Published: July 3, 2006