I'm The Bad Guy

Big names Morgan Freeman (INVICTUS) and John Cusack (CON AIR) and Freeman’s DRIVING MISS DAISY director Bruce Beresford went directly to DVD in THE CONTRACT, a Nu Image/Millennium thriller filmed mainly in Bulgaria.

Recently widowed high school gym coach Ray Keene (Cusack) and his surly teen delinquent-in-training son Chris (Jamie Anderson) are camping in the Washington wilderness when a stone killer drops into their midst. Big-time assassin Frank Carden (Freeman) escapes from custody, but is almost immediately recaptured by the Keenes, who just happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Ray, whose desire to be a good influence on his son has him set on taking Frank in, tries to take Frank in, but he and his boy have Carden’s team, a pack of government-trained killers, on their trail.

It’s all fairly routine thriller stuff with the occasionally sloppy writing balanced by the charming performances by Cusack and the always avuncular Freeman, who gets all the funny lines. It’s heavily padded with unnecessary subplots, as if the concept of Everyman and Killer confined in the woods, old as it is, wasn’t interesting enough (it is).

While THE CONTRACT is nothing special (and that goes for the title too), it’s good enough to play theaters, and it’s likely Millennium’s finances had more to do with it bypassing U.S. theaters than its quality. THE CONTRACT is a passable 96 minutes with pretty scenery and solid acting by two stars who are always welcome.