Rodrigo Amaro "I Hired a Contract Killer" unites on the same crossroad two helpless and persistent souls of the world cinema, working with a plot that suits them almost perfectly: director/writer Aki Kaurismaki and actor Jean-Pierre Léaud. I include the latter not much because of his real persona but mostly due to his most commonly associated character, the troubled Antoine Doinel, which in a way could be a figure of a Kaurismaki film and the director takes some advantage of that to make Léaud be part of his strange yet dark humored vignettes involving helpless characters dealing with meaningless lives until they find exquisite solutions for their problems. The eternal Doinel, usually confident and striving for a certain goal (as evidenced in his later adventures post "The 400 Blows"), gives space to Henri Boulanger, a French subordinate working on a bureaucratic position at a British company, utterly lost and alone, until the day he gets fired from there, receiving as a gift a broken gold watch. With the money he still has, he decides to hire a hit-man to kill him since he's too yellow to kill himself. Why bother sticking around now that he really hit rock bottom, with no job, no people who care for him and being just another foreigner living in a cold and distant place. But the man who brought us "Ariel" and "Shadows in Paradise" has to give Henri a turn-around that can save his life and also complicates things even more. He falls for a flower girl (Margi Clarke) who corresponds such love, they move in together, despite the fact he has nothing to offer to her but the hired killer (Kenneth Corley) is still tracking him down and he is destined to fulfill his contract and kill Henri. Typical of Kaurismaki, who always finds humor in desolated characters and awkward situations. Everything is strangely life affirming without getting near the corny clichés of Hollywood.The union between Kaurismaki and Léaud is the main ingredient to enjoy such story, not as dark as it sounds but eventually nightmarish as Henri's problems becomes more and more unnerving (hilarious to some, but we all know that Aki's films are only amusing to very few who can actually laugh out loud - though that's not the director's intentions, he prefers the contained laughters). It's interesting to see Léaud becoming the anti-Doinel, here someone who is far removed from any chance of accomplishing anything, always escaping and giving up easily. But fate helps them both, in unexpected and intriguing ways. And we laugh at their confusion while facing the obstacles life throws at them. Compared with other Kaurismaki films I've seen and Doinel's five films, "I Hired a Contract Killer" is miles away of being equally great as the fore-mentioned examples. And for the first time I identified more with the drama than with the comedy since most of the elements given were too hollow and so narrow with the drama that I couldn't find them much funny - characteristic of the Finnish creator but more effective in his other films. Another downer was having to deal with Léaud's poor English, practically impossible to understand. Why not make Henri meeting with a French girl, so there could be a real sense of connection between both (and captions so we can read instead of hearing forced accents)? Aside that, there's room for some fine suspense and a great musical cameo by Joe Strummer. What's to be learned? With Doinel films I feel hope, courage and the sense that things can get better, even with some losses on the way. Now, with Henri's story, I know things can get worse but we can always push harder for one more day and see what happens next. A very needed film in darker times, because we all need to laugh at the absurd. 7/10

antoinecatry Among the few Kaurismaki films I have seen so far, this is the one I think the most accessible and I strongly recommend it. My impression of it is completely vivid as I have just watched it minutes ago from the box I was offered a year ago for my 30's: a great present for movie maniacs. Kaurismaki does not film Helsinki this time, but another capital:London, with the same kind of views, the same urban landscapes, the beauty and the strangeness, the same insisting and passionate obsession than Scorsese with his New York. You still can find the same taciturnity of characters (perfect Kenneth Colley as the killer: I was glad to recognize Admiral Piett from The Empire Strikes Back), the same type of slow narration, though this time, the story is far simpler to understand upon first visualization. It deals with life and its contradictions, the preciosity of it, changes of mind and regrets, how desire between two people can make you see things differently, make you want to live on ; love regardless of social discrimination, that is so beautiful and yet so ideal! Another great point in Kaurismaki's films consists in the appropriate inclusion of a more or less famous rock music: perfect Joe Strummer, RIP. A great moment of poetry in cinema and a perfect film fit for beginners in Kaurismaki.

unnatural_habitat Aki Kaurismäki, like all true film auteurs, creates worlds. Not in the sci-fi fantasy sense — though, I am not excluding sci-fi, merely broadening the concept — but in the subjective sense. Like Jarmusch, Fassbinder and Lynch, you get a feeling while watching a Kaurismäki movie that you are watching something highly personal. And so it goes with his odd and amusing love story, I Hired a Contract Killer, about a man who wants to kill himself but reconsiders after falling in love.Roll your eyes and say you've seen that kind of movie before, but with Kaurismäki at the helm you get something genuinely touching, without forced pathos, incidental-music, or faux-inspirational endings. Starring Jean-Pierre Léaud, the French nouvelle vague star of such movies as American Night and 400 blows, IHCK moves us from Kaurismäki's usual film location in Helsinki to London. Like the down-and-out squalor of Kaurismäki's working class neighborhoods in Helsinki, the London depicted here isn't the refined upper-class cosmopolis depicted in Woody Allen's latest movies, rather it's a drab, trash-strewn working class London full of thugs and hard-drinking wage slaves.Jean-Pierre is plays Frenchman named Henri, who was spent the las 15 years of his life working for the same boring English company. Because of financial difficulties, his job has become redundant, and "foreigners" are the first ones to get the ax. Distraught — for his rote day job was the only thing that kept him from self-reflection — Henri decides to kill himself. He attempts to hang himself, fails when the rope snaps; so he tries to gas himself, but a gas strike that day leaves him without gas. The next day he reads an article about hit men operating in the city, and decides to hire a hit-man to do the job.He finds a lowdown bar in the roughest part of London and ridiculously goes to the bar and orders a ginger ale, much to the derision of the roughnecks around him. He announces, in his strong French accent, that "where I come from, veee eeet people like you for breakfast". This seems to calm suspicions. He finally meets the underworld boss and hires a contract killer.He spends the next hours anticipating his imminent death by constantly looking over his shoulder and providing clues for the hit-man to find him. One such clue is a note on his front door, indicating that he has gone out for a pint in the bar across the street. The very night that the hit-man is about to finish his job, he meets Margaret, a young women selling roses, and — in typically quirky Kaurismäki fashion — immediately falls in love. After barely evading the hit-man that night, he decides to call off the job. So he goes back to the bar from where he hired him, and, rather hilariously, it has burned down.This is probably the most Hitchcockian Kaurismäki has ever gotten, but it's an amusing and suspenseful plot device. Henri and Margaret spend the rest of the movie one step ahead of the hit-man, moving from her small apartment to a hotel, and finally with Henri going on the lamb when he finds himself unfairly implicated in a neighborhood hold up. Much like the characters in Jarmush's Down by Law, Henri becomes an innocent man with just about everybody against him — and, like Jarmush, Kaurismäki manages to make all his characters endearing and subtly humorous. This great mashup of an absurd, Kafka-esquire world, nearly-Hitchcockian suspense, and gentle humor, make this a not just a gangster movie parody, or a run-of-the mill love story, but truly, a movie with heart.

johnny99-5 The premise is so stupid -- guy is such a failure that he can't even kill himself, so he hires a contract killer to do it for him.Then he falls in love and changes his mind.Really, I can't emphasise enough how bad this movie is. It's not "so bad it's good", it's so bad it's BAD. But I still remember it after all these years so it must have struck some sort of chord.P.S. Has Warren Beatty seen this movie? Because the same plot starts off Bulworth.