Assassin tells the story of Alexa (Nomzamo Mbatha), a soldier whose husband (Mustafa Shakir) was a member of secret government program in which people would allow their minds to be transferred into the bodies of strangers so that those strangers could then be used to assassinate America’s enemies.  When Alexa’s husband ends up in a coma as a result of trying to assassinate Adrian (Dominic Purcell), Alexa is forcefully recruited into the program and is sent to complete her husband’s mission.

That may sound like it would make for an intriguing film but Assassin is pretty dull.  Neither Nomzamo Mbatha nor Dominic Purcell give particularly interesting performances and the film’s plot and themes were far better explored in Brandon Cronenberg’s Possessor.  Watching the film, I found it impossible to have much sympathy for Alexa because she was not only murdering people but she was also ruining the lives of the innocent people who she ended up possessing.  The fact that her husband was in a coma didn’t excuse any of that.  If anything it made Alexa even less sympathetic.  After seeing what being an assassin did to her husband, why would Alexa want any of that?

Towards the end of the film, one of Alexa’s targets realizes that Alexa is possessing someone else’s body.  Alexa’s handler announces that she’s going to pull Alexa out of the body and then “get the wet team to take this guy out.”  If you have a team that can do it, why are you wasting time with possessing other people’s bodies?  Why would you decide to use the most complicated plan available when you could just simply send in a team and or have a drone blow up the guy’s house?  It’s almost as if the program is designed to be too complex to work.  As I watched the film, I suddenly started to understand why the CIA was never able to take out  Castro.  Sometimes, people just make things complicated for no reason.

Sadly, Assassin is also the final film of Bruce Willis.  Willis plays Valmora, the guy who is in charge of the Assassin program.  As was typical of Willis’s final films, he only gets a few minutes of screen time and he spends most of that time either sitting down or standing in a corner.  Willis, even though he obviously wasn’t in the best of health when he shot this film, still projects enough natural authority to be believable as Valmora.  Even though it’s obvious that he’s repeating lines that were fed to him just a few minutes before shooting, Willis still gives the most (and perhaps only) credible performance in the film.

Assassin is a sad note for Bruce Willis to go out on.  Of Willis’s final batch of films, the best were Gasoline Alley, Corrective Measures, and Wire Room.  Assassin, however, is just dull and anyone tempted to watch it just because of Willis’s presence would be better served to go rewatch Die Hard, Pulp Fiction, The Sixth Sense, 12 Monkeys, or …. well, really, any other movie that Bruce Willis ever appeared in.  Bruce Willis was one of our greatest movie stars and nothing, not even films like Assassin, can change that.