Assassin’s Bullet

Christian Slater stars as an aimless sleuth.

Christian Slater stars as an aimless sleuth.

Times are tough for Christian Slater. Not only is he starring in “Assassin’s Bullet,” a cheesy Eastern European thriller that looks like it was made on the kind of budget associated with a middle school A/V club, his character turns out to be mostly an irrelevant bystander.

Slater plays a tragically widowed former supercop, now working in the US Embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria, who gets dragged back into sleuthing for no particular reason except that the ambassador (Donald Sutherland) asks him to. While pursuing a mystery vigilante who keeps murdering Muslim terrorists, Slater’s character is careful to make lots of time for drinking away the pain of his wife’s killing and loitering in a belly-dancing club with a pal (Timothy Spall), a shrink whose prize patient (Elika Portnoy) is a teacher battling disturbing memories.

Corny action scenes and borderline-hilarious direction by Isaac Florentine mark the film as an obvious straight-to-video item that somehow took a wrong turn into a movie theater. But Portnoy shows flashes of talent, and at least there are one or two twists to keep things moving stupidly along.

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