A few more kilos and the extra facial hair after Bond comes Noble. Julian Noble. Brosnan couldn’t have chosen a better movie to do after the Bond series. Right after being passed over by the bosses to play Bond for Casino Royale, he plays an assassin who’s burnt out. And he does a brilliant job of it.
The Matador pairs up Brosnan with Greg Kinnear who plays Danny Wright in the movie. Complete opposites, but they end up as the best of friends. Brosnan is wonderfully hilarious (who knew that Bond could be funny??) in his portrayal as a burnt out assassin. He still carries the Bond charm, and ofcourse attracts women all over the world, and sometimes even pays for them. But he isnt’t trigger-happy anymore and can’t do his job right (facilitating fatalities, as he puts it), and that can’t be too good for a hitman right? And in the process he drags in Kinnear, a simple businessman, into a world he knows nothing about.
Though most actors would have a difficult time in shedding an image like the one Brosnan created being 007, he does it with flair, giving what is possibly the best performance of his career.
And the scene where Brosnan walks through the hotel lobby, in nothing but Speedos, with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in another, shows the character’s indifference to other people perfectly. You can almost imagine him in that scene, holding a finger up as a message to all the people who thought he was merely a one-dimension actor.
Great movie, and even better performances by Kinnear and Brosnan. More than worth a watch!