K-SCORE: 99
Director: George Armitage
Story: Tom Jankiewicz
Starring: John Cusack, Minnie Driver, Joan Cusack, Dan Aykroyd, Alan Arkin, Jeremy Piven
Spoiler Level: Minor
If there’s an upper limit on the number of times I can watch and enjoy Grosse Pointe Blank, I haven’t found it yet. This is the iconic dark comedy. When I think of perfect films, ones with scripts so tight, performances so impeccable, premises so inescapably brilliant that I can’t find flaws, this is what I think of. Grosse Pointe Blank is almost universally revered by any who have seen it, and yet somehow it is too little talked about for being on the short list of best films of all time. Grosse Pointe Blank is incredible.
John Cusack is masterful as Martin Blank, a professional assassin who returns to his old hometown when coincidentally he has a hit scheduled in the area around the same time of his ten year high school reunion. That he’s crippled by the social anxiety of going to the reunion when the business of killing people has become commonplace is the driving force for most of the comedy, and it’s exceptional. Every character is amusing, every line is either hilarious or essential to the high-functioning story, or both. I need to watch two dozen new comedies to laugh as often as I will with my twenty-fifth go-around of Grosse Pointe Blank, and in so doing I’m not likely to get a tenth the quality in terms of drama, romance, and action. There are potent existential questions raised in Grosse Pointe Blank, delivered at lightspeed as the plot flies by in brightly lit atmospheres with overwhelmed characters piecing things together at their own rate for their own purposes. The film is the most successful ‘coming home in your thirties’ / ‘high school doesn’t seem that long ago’ kind of story in story history, and really that’s just an amusing backdrop for everything else. The closest thing I can find to a fault is that a little too much time is spent with the two FBI guys given their importance to the rest of the story and where they end up. That's it. That's the best I got. And that they're in the story, the role they play in the whole conflict, and where they end up (haha) is fantastic, so it's really not much of a complaint.
Grosse Pointe Blank is the best film that was made in 1997, and in 1997 some geniuses created The Fifth Element. That Roger Ebert gave this film 2.5 stars out 4 indicates that you should probably ignore 37.5% of everything he wrote. That this film and The Fifth Element weren’t even nominated for best picture by The Academy is just more of what is now boundless evidence that you should ignore everything they have to say. The brilliance of the witty dialogue in Grosse Pointe Blank makes the same in Good Will Hunting look like Jackass, and makes everything that was written for the film Titanic look like it was conceived by Johnny Knoxville after someone shot him in the head with a sandbag from a riot gun.
Even better, Grosse Pointe Blank is flawlessly filmic. It’s a story that works better in its format than anything else, that’s best told in its two hour timeframe. It doesn’t have sequels or spin-offs or remakes. This is standalone movie glory, seamless storytelling at its finest. If you haven’t seen Grosse Pointe Blank, I envy you because now you can enjoy it for the first time, which is among the most wonderful experiences you can have sitting in front of a big screen.