Movie Spotlight: The Good Assassin

Greene has been trained his whole life to be an assassin. The job he can’t bring himself to finish is a man named Benny, who doesn’t particularly care if he lives or dies.

That’s the setup of The Good Assassin, the feature debut from writer-director John Mahurin, who developed the script as an independent study at Kutztown University. He’d been watching In Bruges and playing Metal Gear Solid 3 and found himself drawn to the space between what someone is trained to do and what they’re actually capable of. The film grew from there.

Two definitions of “good”

The title is doing double work. Greene is “good” in the moral sense: he has a conscience, a hesitation, a compass he can’t fully silence. That makes him terrible at the job. Sharpie is “good” in the professional sense: cold, precise, unencumbered by empathy. “Good intentions versus proficiency is the dual meaning in the title,” Mahurin says. Neither version adds up to a complete human being.

The first job problem

Greene tells himself he’s using Benny as a study subject: a target who won’t resist, who offers ample opportunity to practice without real risk. It’s a story he needs. What’s actually happening is that Benny’s apathy has made him genuinely interesting, someone worth watching rather than eliminating. “Greene could never have expected that his target would be someone who wouldn’t care if he lived or died,” Mahurin says. The moral compass his family buried, Greene can’t quite reach.

Comedy through character, not jokes

Mahurin’s approach to tone was direct: if a scene can be made funny, make it funny; if it can’t, don’t try. His actors pushed back in a few moments, feeling the comedic framing didn’t fit the truth of the scene, and he listened. Some of those straight-played moments he now considers the film’s strongest. There’s also a joke in the second act, he says, that broke the cast every single take. He won’t say which one.

Organized crime at ground level

The film belongs to a territory Mahurin has always been drawn to: a major conflict unfolding right under the noses of ordinary people. He cites Barry and Sakamoto Days as touchstones. The comedy, he says, comes from how mundane the actual lives of these would-be criminals turn out to be once you strip away the mythology. The characters have these insecurities, these relationships, these ways of handling situations that don’t always make sense. That’s the story.

What to know before you press play

Mahurin spent nearly two years finishing this film. Scheduling conflicts, creative conflicts, and somewhere in the middle of it all he shattered his foot and had it replaced with a piece of metal. The film still got made. “Saying ‘I hope you like it’ feels like I’m underselling it after all that,” he says. “So instead I’ll say, I hope you REALLY like this movie. And thanks for making it all worthwhile by giving it a watch.”

Comedy

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Streaming now on Relay.