Grosse Pointe Cool

Between punk and the millennium, between T-2 and The Matrix, between the golden age of action movies and the post-9/11 rebirth of high fantasy... there was an oddly sleepy sort of time called the 1990s. Action comedy Grosse Pointe Blank very much represents the better end of that particular market. (Please don't ask what was at the other end.)

John Cusack is there. He's still pretty much got it. In fact he's as good as he ever was. And as a leftover 1980s teen heartthrob par excellence (albeit better known to "my" generation as that guy from The Grifters and Wesley Crusher's dead older brother in Stand by Me), he fits his role perfectly. He's now doing the quintessentially cool amoral 1990s thing - which is of course contract killing. (Hey! After the '80s even Bond was little more than a hitman - witness Dalton and Brosnan in Living Daylights and World is Not Enough!) And indeed 1980s top funny man Dan Ackroyd is there too, also great as ever (and even getting a throwaway Ghostbusters-type line about astral projection and telepathy).

So if you ever wondered what happened to John Hughes' kids, well, they got hip, they got cynical, they got cool... and they warmed up for Fight Club ("I don't think what a guy does for a living reflects who he really is", "You can never go home again, but you can shop there.") and (of course, "killing a lot of people"!) American Psycho. (Did mini-marts even in the '90s have Blistex and Trojan condoms on the front counter? Funny how it's always the most recent past feels the most alien!)

So Cusack plays a hitman called Martin. He wears black. His surname is 'Blank'. Get it? He's not a real person. He's a Man in Black. (This was the era of classic X-Files, remember, and before Men in Black the movie! In fact his secretary - played gloriously by Cusack's own sister - even has Scully's outfit and hairdo.) But is he also firing blanks - metaphorically in as much as he wants to quit the cool job that he's now too cool for? (I do really like Blank's office though. In those days even "old school" could still be cool!)

The actual gags though are also fired off thick and fast, and a surprising number are palpable hits. An assassin who sees a shrink was way ahead of Analyse This (and a much gentler but more incisive dig at the post-'80s "kinder, gentler" 1990s craze for counselling and "caring"*). And the one-liners are smart and daring. Greatest disappearing act since white flight? (WTF? Couldn't get away with that nowadays!) Live and Let Die on the soundtrack? Cheeky! The Story of a Mediocre Genesis? Nice!

And that Kipling quote is way, way deep!

*In reality it was little more than the boomers' moving on from their '80s physical exercise loopiness to trying to fill the spiritual void a decade later with neo-Freudian, New-Age bullshit.