Code Name Banshee‘s assassin story lacks creative firepower
Jaime King and Antonio Banderas star in a rinse-and-repeat exercise in expended bullets
Film Reviews Code Name Banshee
If and when extraterrestrials ever conduct a full quantitative inventory and analysis of our filmed entertainment, assassins would definitely fall into the category of occupational statistical overrepresentation, and probably merit some red-flag questions about humankind’s cultural preoccupation.
Decades ago, it was easy to view many films about assassins as chiefly an exploration of the taboo. Certainly, via the work of John Woo and others, assassin tales unpacked the notion of heroic bloodshed. Then such stories also became vehicles for flamboyant exhibitions of style. It could also be argued that in their most well-crafted incarnations, movies about assassins offered up a way to comment on the times.
Now, watching movies like Code Name Banshee, starring Jaime King and Antonio Banderas, it seems worth questioning whether our fascination is rooted in anything genuine, or simply a reflexive, held-at-gunpoint narrative template—the path of least resistance for a cobbled-together coalition of international financiers who see movies less as actual stories than 90-minute collections of filmed scenes in which people run around with guns.
Directed by Jon Keeyes, Code Name Banshee centers around Delilah (King), a contract killer whose professional moniker gives the movie its title. After an ill-conceived flashback cold opening which establishes several parties being framed by the CIA, Delilah arrives for a job only to find she’s been set-up by Anthony Greene (Tommy Flanagan), another killer with connections to her father’s years-ago disappearance and presumed death.
Anthony wants the location of Delilah’s old mentor Caleb Navvaro (Banderas), who has retired and gone off the grid. Delilah rejects his threatening offer, but Anthony flips her computer-hacking assistant, Kronos (Aleksander Vayshelboym), who clues Anthony and his roster of goons into Delilah’s (correct) belief that she might know where Caleb is. As Anthony closes in, this sets up a showdown involving Delilah, Caleb, and Caleb’s young adult daughter Hailey (Catherine Davis), who believes her father to simply be a construction worker who’s fallen into disfavor with the mob.
Keeyes, a prolific, independent-minded producer-director whose credits include a lot of modestly-budgeted genre efforts, seemingly aims here for “day-making” functionality, and the result is damaging. In both staging and overall pacing, he repeatedly rebuffs opportunities to give his film a sense of individual personality.
As scripted by Matthew Rogers, Code Name Banshee also struggles to carve out any genuine sense of differentiation for itself. The motivation and stakes are all two-dimensional, defined only by mortality and the pat designation of certain characters as good and others as bad. The flashback material, which attempts to create some mystery or intrigue about Delilah’s past, and her path to this line of work, doesn’t connect, and only creates more questions by way of a muddied timeline.
Further weighing the movie down is amateurish and utterly unappealing technical packaging. Benjamin Weinman’s score is both pounding and tired, timed to specific onscreen impacts. The action staging, with the arguable exception of a one-on-three confrontation at Caleb’s bar, is generic, leaving editor R.J. Cooper to try (and more often than not fail) to cut around problem areas. Worst of all is a misguided visual palette, from cinematographer Austin F. Schmidt, that leans into heavy shadow and attempts to impose a single aesthetic across several very different locations.
If there’s a pinch of counterbalancing quality, it’s arguably in the acting. Flanagan introduces his character with smartly calibrated flair, and makes him somewhat distinct without tipping over into rampant scenery-chewing. King, given the heaviest lift, plays things straight and square-jawed.
Banderas, meanwhile, locates slight notes of regret which make a viewer wish they could simply wander off with his character into a different film. Early in his career, Banderas leveraged and leaned into his raw charisma and physicality for roles. Since suffering a heart attack and undergoing surgery in 2017, he’s been open about the effects of those health struggles on his perspective on acting.
That shift, or maturation, has yielded rich new veins of comfortableness in his own skin, for in his slowly deployed smiles and other nonverbal cues there are thousands of different meanings. Code Name Banshee teases this pleasant depth, giving Banderas two good scenes, inclusive of a fireside catch-up with Delilah. Unfortunately, it also saddles him with some cringe-inducing dialogue (“There’s more to life than just contract killing”), and underutilizes him in general.
In the end, Code Name Banshee doesn’t have interesting ideas about who its characters are, or even wish to be. It’s a cliché-driven, rinse-and-repeat exercise in expended bullets, nothing more.
29 Comments
Based on the top photo, I’m assuming Banderas’s character is Irish.
Top o’ the mornin’, cabrón.
Pendejo’reilly
Code Name Banshee 0:08 that’s Marilyn Monroe slinky moving through the crowd almost unnoticed she’s Eldon Tyrell fucking Sir Ridley Scott didn’t have the balls to make Eldon Tyrell a woman when he filmed Blade Runner there she is standing in a bar in Nevada pay her or she’ll drop the flask no more warnings from her pay her or everyone on this planet dies
He looks drunk.
I can’t think of a better way for a professional contract killer to disappear off the grid than cutting their hair like Conor McGregor and moving to Ireland.
It’s part of the same universe as Highlander, where the Irishmen are Spanish, the Scotsmen are French and the Egyptians are Scottish.
…and the sheep are scared!
Would that be akin to Christopher Lambert trying to be American?
BANDERAS ROJO!
We’ll always have Havana.
There should be more films about assassins who aren’t being paid for their work but instead view it as their way to get a foot in the door to a job, like Charles Guiteau.
“There’s more to life than just contract killing”
Well there you have it, baby
I’m just a sensitive guy
Y’know I snuffed a million planets
But I still find time to cry
Because there’s more to life
Than making other people die
I don’t even like musical theatre, but I would either write, co-produce, or at least definitely attend the story of a plucky would-be hitman trying to make it, in: Vinny Get Your Button.
Not related to the Cinemax show Banshee.
Haywire is a good movie & a rare time Antonio Banderas made you root against him
I was rooting against him in Ecks Vs. Sever long before it was cool.Then again, I was rooting against everyone in that movie.
I love Lucy Liu & I could not even root for her in that movie. Ugh
I just can’t take my eyes off Ginger Banderas.
Damn. I saw the headline and thought Code Name Banshee was some sort of spinoff/prequel for Cinemax’s kick ass show Banshee.
Is a being known for its shrill piercing scream a good name for an assassin?
I think it’s funny that fictional assassins always have “cool” codenames like Banshee or Ghost or Iceman. I want to see assassins nicknamed Pickles or Kleenex or Word-A-Day Calendar.
I saw this guy on youtube, I think a retired Marine aviator, and he said nobody has cool callsigns like “Maverick” or “Iceman”. Callsigns, like any other nickname, are bestowed by your peers, and usually are something silly or embarrassing. He rattled off a few real callsigns of pilots he served with and the only one that was kinda cool was a woman named Katrina, callsign “Hurricane”.
Was that the Legal Eagle video about Top Gun?
I think so
woman named Katrina, callsign “Hurricane”Because when she comes she’s wild and wet, but when she goes she takes your house and car?
Word-A-Day Calendar.HE KNOWS 365 WORDS…FOR ‘KILL’!
So did I.
I thought Louis CK started HGH.
> If and when extraterrestrials ever conduct a full quantitative inventory and analysis of our filmed entertainment, assassins would definitely fall into the category of occupational statistical overrepresentation, and probably merit some red-flag questions about humankind’s cultural preoccupation.Yes, this. Feels like “contract killer” has gone from being a comment on society (see e.g. Melville’s Le Samouraï), to exercises in pure style (Leon), to the worst sort of queasy wish fulfillment that references nothing but itself. “I’m an assassin but it’s okay because I don’t shoot children except for that one time I did which I am properly sad about.” Which movie is that from? Feels like all of them.