Cusack’s a handsome devil -- a fact that he reminds us of several times in the film -- but here, it works against him. Even half-covered in blood, he comes across as the boy-next-door. In movies such as The Grifters and Woody Allen’s Bullets over Broadway, he has proven to be an actor that can well execute his craft. In Grosse Pointe Blank, however, Cusack as filmmaker seems to have miscast himself as a paid killer.

Grosse Pointe Blank, released by Hollywood Pictures, is the story of Martin Q. Blank, a professional assassin who reaches an unexpected state of satori just about the time of his high school reunion. At the urging of his assistant, Marcella (played by sister Joan Cusack), and his psychotherapist, Dr. Oatman (played by Alan Arkin), Blank attends the reunion with the full intention of looking up Debi Newberry (played by Minnie Driver), the girl he left behind. It seems like a viable enough vehicle for a film -- in which there would be no shortage of humorous twists and turns -- but the movie can’t cut it. It ends up as nothing more than an unrealistic potpourri of tired killing jokes, a sanitized Pulp Fiction that had me catching up on a few lost hours of precious sleep.

Minnie Driver

As is typical in the standard Hollywood product, things take a turn for the worse for Blank as we move deeper into the plot. When he returns to his hometown of Grosse Pointe, he’s greeted by one paid killer who’s been hired to murder him and another, Mr. Grocer (played by Dan Aykroyd), who tries to recruit him into a sort of union of hit men, a homicidal AFL-CIO, so to speak.

Eventually Blank comes to the obligatory self-realization that his chosen profession carries some emotional baggage with it, so he makes moves to redeem himself. It was about at this point in the film that my head hit the seat in front of me, so I’m not quite sure what prompted the Cusack character to reach enlightenment. In fact, I was having a hard time concentrating through most of the movie -- Gone With The Wind this film is not.

To be fair, Grosse Pointe Blank does have it’s good points: Joe Strummer’s soundtrack is excellent and there were plenty of action scenes. In fact, Cusack’s stunt-double is probably the best actor in the movie. Furthermore, there are a couple of classic moments in the film. Cusack’s interaction with an irresistibly cute infant is nothing less than precious. The camera zooms in on the baby’s bubbly, innocent face and then back to Cusack who observes the youngster with the confounded expression of a man peering under the hood of his car.

The problem with Grosse Pointe Blank, I suppose, is that what worked in concept did not translate so well to the screen. Perhaps the undertaking was too ambitious, who knows. Nevertheless, one could imagine the screenwriters (Tom Jankiewicz, D.V. DeVincentis, Steve Pink and Cusack) huddled together saying, “Hit man at his high school reunion. Ha! won’t that be funny!” Unfortunately, for the most part, it’s not -- which probably accounts for the fact that, in a theater full of people, nobody seemed to be doing a heck of a lot of laughing.