Point Blank capitalizes on Cusack charm

Except for maybe Tom Cruise, John Cusack is probably the closest thing we have to an old fashioned movie star in contemporary cinema. While he doesn't pull in the $20 million dollar salaries of Jim Carrey and Tom Hanks, he's got a real sense of screen persona that they both lack and besides that, he's a hell of a lot sexier.

Unlike most of his '80s matinee idol peers, he's managed to bring the screen persona of One Crazy Summer, Better Off Dead, and Say Anything (the single greatest teen film ever made) into the grown-up world without having to go through any kind of jarring reinvention. From then to now, Cusack has specialized in playing a sort of everyman - a guy a little too smart for his own good, a little too talkative, and a little too nervous; and if he never really outgrows Say Anything's Lloyd Dobbler, that's not really a bad thing. Because, like all great movie stars, the best John Cusack movies feature him as some variation of John Cusack, or at least acknowledge the existence of his screen persona.

Which is exactly what George Armitage's Grosse Point Blank does - it uses everything you know about John Cusack and what he's like in his movies to seduce you, and to get its dark little message across. Playing a hitman named Martin Q. Blank (the name is one of the few too-obvious jokes in the script), Cusack's character at first seems a little like Roy, the petty conman he played in Stephen Frear's The Grifters; as the film goes on, it turns out that Martin's pretty much the exact opposite.

Where Cusack's Roy was a half decent guy in over his head, his Martin turns out to be the consummate professional, and the ultimate in cool - too cool, in fact: he's getting bored with his line of work, he tells his terrified shrink (Alan Arkin, dead-on hilarious), and doesn't feel the same kind of job satisfaction that he used to. So when he gets both an invitation to attend his ten-year high school reunion and a contract hit that takes place in the same town, he decides to head home for the first time in a decade and sort out what he wants to do.

All of this could be played as some kind of noir-thriller, or Jim Thompson Lite sort of affair, but it's transformed into something weirder: a sunny black comedy. Part of Martin's return home involves facing up to the girl he's still in love with (Minnie Driver) whom he stood up on prom night and hasn't seen since, and while the romantic subplot could have detracted from the film's more stylish, post-Tarantino elements, Cusack and Driver play off of each other with a weird, and believable energy. And it's not like there's a whole lot time for wooing in any case, with Martin being pursued by Federal Agents, a hitman with a contract out on him, and Grocer (Dan Aykroyd), a fellow assassin trying to convince Martin to join his hitman's union or die.

The script (co-written by Cusack) packs in a lot of plot and tons of clever lines, but ultimately it's the actors who carry the film, and not just Cusack: this is the best Dan Aykroyd's been in anything since maybe Saturday Night Live, and Jeremy Spiven (Singles) is pretty funny as a former classmate of Martin's who gets briefly involved in Martin's business affairs. Best of all is Joan Cusack as Martin's secretary - she nearly steals the movie from her brother.

Armitage has the good sense to keep things light and not overwhelm either the audience or the actors. In the end, Grosse Point Blank is sort of a disturbing film: Martin, for all his charm, is a pretty amoral and sociopathic kind of guy, and it's to the movie's credit that it doesn't whack you over the head with this point. It's a good time, but a slightly unsettling one.

Grosse Point Blank shows Marrch 14 at 7:30 p.m., 9:30 p.m. and 11:30 p.m. in Kettering 11. Admission is $1.