The story of this dramatic movie revolves around a girl still in the high school but she enters into a friendship with his old neighbor, who is the murderer at the CIA before he is being retired and now there are only some months in his life.
It's a quirky life-lessons setup that, while occasionally earning deadpan laughs, tries for but never achieves Wes Anderson's patented mixture of the archly witty and the sneakily emotional.
Folks buying a ticket to Ashby hoping to see a film about the late-great director of Being There and Harold and Maude are about to be sorely disappointed. So is everyone else.
It's a comedy afraid of being too funny lest its macho sentimentality seem even more ridiculous than it is, and a drama afraid of appearing too serious lest you dismiss it as hogwash.
Women can't teach boys to become men, so the reformed assassin has become the potential (movie) ticket to seeing a satisfactorily performed forging of a boy into a real man.
