“Ashby” tells quirky tale of high schooler and assassin
– FILM REVIEW – By Cate Marquis –
“Ashby” is coming-of-age comedy about teenaged boy who befriends a neighbor who turns out to be a retired CIA assassin. Mickey Rourke plays the CIA operative Ashby Holt, a widower who also lost his only child and lives a kind of quiet, solitary existence. Ashby becomes a kind of mentor to a teenaged boy who is new in town and approaches him about interviewing him for a school assignment. This low-budget, indie film looks nice and has some name actors in the cast, which also includes Nat Wolff, Sarah Silverman and Emma Roberts, but the script is often unbelievable and cliche-ridden. Yet, surprisingly, that cast saves the film, and the actors often are able to bring more human warmth to this story than the script promises.
Ed Wallis (Nat Wolff) and his newly-divorced mom (Sarah Silverman) have just moved to a new town from Oregon and are trying to adjust to their new circumstances. Enrolled in a private school, Ed is a bright kid yet he longs to be on the school’s fabled football team. At school, he is befriended by another smart kid, Eloise (Emma Roberts), who is the daughter of a widowed neurosurgeon. Eloise has an MRI at her house and is doing a study on the brains of the football team, looking at the effects of hits taken during the playing season. When Ed gets an assignment to write a paper on an “old person,” he approaches his gray-haired neighbor Ashby. At first the reclusive, hard-drinking Ashby turns him down, but then agrees to be interviewed, if Ed will agree to drive him around town. Ashby lost his driver’s license after an accident, which revealed that he is dying of an unnamed disease. While Ed is unaware of Ashby’s diagnosis, it takes remarkably little effort for him to discover Ashby’s secret past as a killer for the CIA.
Likely? No, but “Ashby” plays this preposterous premise basically for laughs, as it does the other unlikely events that start the story rolling, such as the seemingly nerdy Ed making the football team after tryouts, with surprisingly effort. This “don’t bother me with reality” attitude is in contrast to the film’s low-key comic tone. Tony McNamara both wrote and directed “Ashby” but the thing that rescues this far-fetched film are the actors’ performances. Even that takes awhile but the appealing characters they create and their relationships somehow seem more believable than the silly to cliched set-ups that create them. Without this strong cast, “Ashby” would have nothing.
Even with a better cast than it deserves, “Ashby” is hardly essential viewing. It is a light, little film that exists in a movie fantasy land, with a big moral message about doing the right thing after doing the wrong one. Both Wolff and Roberts look too old to be high schoolers, and Sarah Silverman hardly looks old enough to be Wolff’s mother. The whole story seems to exist in an unreal place where a teen can discover his neighbor is an assassin by casually opening a cabinet drawer – one the assassin told him to open, apparently forgetting he left six passports in it – oops!
“Ashby” is kind of funny, and the characters are appealing and even touching. Yet as likeable as Mickey Rourke’s grizzled, quietly religious assassin with a hidden heart of gold is, as appealing as Nat Wolff’s smart kid turned jock and the budding romance between him and Emma Robert’s cutely quirky character is, or even his oddly frank relationship with his mom, none of this story seems real.
“Ashby” opens Friday, September 25, at the Chesterfield AMC Cinema.
© Cate Marquis
