Quick Reviews: Killers, Splice

It's time to catch up with the movies. I'm not sure if these are still in the theaters at this point, so they may not be helpful if you're trying to pick a movie to see this weekend. Sorry. Regular readers know I sometimes procrastinate with these. And this is a case where these two different films arrive at the same grade for different reasons.

I had low expectations for "Killers." First, the female lead is Katherine Heigl, who followed up her success on TV's "Grey's Anatomy" and the big-screen "Knocked Up" with mediocrity like "27 Dresses" and "The Ugly Truth." Here she plays Jen, a careful, cautious, not remotely spontaneous woman who is on vacation in France with her parents (the fabulous Catherine O'Hara and the not-bad Tom Selleck), when she meets Spencer (Ashton Kutcher), who asks her to dinner. Unbeknownst to her, he's a contract killer for some secret government agency (right after they meet he blows up a boat. This is the second reason for my low expectations: I can't buy Ashton Kutcher as a super-spy/killing machine type. Anyway, they fall in love rather quickly, he proposes, she accepts, and he quits his contract-killer job. Cut to three years later, they're settled into a nice house and a normal life when his old life comes back to haunt him, and it puts the couple's lives in jeopardy. I enjoyed it more than I expected, especially seeing the people that actually are out to kill Spencer. My grade: B-minus.