The Killer’s Game has apparently been circling around development hell for some time, passing through various studios and filmmakers since Rand Ravich first adapted the Jay Bonansinga novel on spec back in 1995. The film finally got made by J.J. Perry, whose only prior feature directing credit was the underrated but still deeply flawed Day Shift with Netflix. But of course the big name here is exec producer/star Dave Bautista, who’s been trying for some time now to boost his profile and expand his range as an actor.

Dave, buddy, you shouldn’t have picked such a novice director and such an outdated script.

Bautista stars as Joe Flood, a world-class assassin with hundreds of confirmed kills. But because Flood sticks to criminals and mercenaries — without ever killing civilians — the rest of the cutthroat community respects him too much to take him out.

The plot starts with a meet-cute between Joe and a star ballerina (Maize, played by Sofia Boutella). Conveniently, Joe meets his love interest just as he starts getting strange headaches. As such, Joe takes all this as a sign that he should get out of the game and settle down while he still can.

Those plans are complicated with the news that Joe is affected by an incurable neurodegerative disorder and he’s only got a few months left to live. Enter Antoinette (Pom Klementieff), a crime lord with a personal vendetta against Joe. (He killed her father. Long story.) Thus Joe gives all of his ill-gotten money to Antoinette so she can hire a hitman to take out Joe. He goes out on his feet, Maize gets the life insurance payout, everybody’s happy.

But then comes the kicker: There was a mix-up at the lab. Joe isn’t dying. Nobody knows what’s going on with his headaches, and no sensible explanation is ever given. Joe tries to cancel the contract, but no backsies. Thus Joe has to fight for survival against every contract killer in Europe. Hilarity ensues.

Let’s start with the obvious issue: Casting. Sofia Boutella is an action star in an action movie. What in the nine hells is she doing, playing a straight-laced civilian without a single fight scene?!

Yes, Batista and Boutella are trying to expand their respective ranges. I get that. I respect it. But the both of them are acting so far out of their respective comfort zones that any kind of romantic chemistry is DOA. And that’s a fatal error in a movie where half the plot is a romcom.

Unfortunately, the poor casting doesn’t stop with our leads. Ben Kingsley is practically sleepwalking through the film. Pom Klementieff is another wasted action star, given nothing to do but chew scenery. Terry Crews is fun to watch, but it’s just another iteration of his same old schtick.

Then again, the pedestrian script is certainly a factor. The plot is predictable, the dialogue is rote, and the characters are all two-dimensional at best. The action scenes are an especially bad case in point, as pretty much all of Joe’s opponents only register as colorful gimmicks.

My personal favorite example is “Money”, played by George Somner. This idiot is Antoinette’s cousin, a preening white faux-gangster douchebag with aspirations of being a hitman. Not that he really knows anything about the job, he just loves guns and money and looking like a tough guy. As repeatedly shown, he is literally too stupid to function and too full of himself to realize it until he graciously backs out of the movie having accomplished fuck-all.

I’m singling this character out because he perfectly embodies the film as a whole.

This film is purely superficial with no intelligence whatsoever. Packed with cliches, preoccupied with empty spectacle, and void of anything iconic or unique or memorable. A film that aspires to be like all the best action movies out there, but with no sense of what makes those other movies fun or engaging or influential.

Too many storylines end in an anticlimax. Too many characters are totally worthless. Too many fight scenes are shot and edited and choreographed without the necessary speed or momentum. Especially compared with the John Wick movies (a comparison openly invited by the film’s promotion), the action scenes are lifeless and void of anything memorable.

Again, it doesn’t exactly help that our lead character is played by Dave Bautista, whose plot armor is so visibly thick that there’s never the least bit of suggestion that he might actually die or suffer any kind of injury. This has gotten to be a concerning trend with Lionsgate films this year.

I’ve often said that trying to blend genres is a high-risk/high reward gambit, and The Killer’s Game is proof. It’s a film that aspires to be a romantic action comedy, and fails at every single one of those things. The casting is too inept to work as a romance, the action is too flat and poorly executed to be any fun, and the script is too loaded with threadbare cliches to be an effective comedy. It’s frankly criminal that a film with this cast should be this boring, and that’s truly the worst condemnation I could say about such an ambitious misfire.

I could maybe recommend this for a rental, but even that’s being generous. Chalk it up as another high-profile failure in a historically bad year for Lionsgate.