Wild Target DVD – Jean Rochefort, Guillaume Depardieu 

An off-beat comedy thriller about the adventures of Victor, a middle-aged assassin and his young apprentice, Antoine. When Victor is told to kill a young girl, Renee, by his gangster bosses he is unable to and instead kills the hoods. The threesome go on the run, but meanwhile another hitman has been hired to clean them up and Victor’s mother, ashamed of her son’s self doubt, is now trying to kill Renee also.

Into the life of Victor a middle-aged professional killer comes Antoine a young messenger who inadvertently becomes involved in a hit. Victor has no son of his own to pass the family business onto and so takes the naive youngester under his wing as his apprentice. The next assignnment is the glamourous Renee an art forger who has conned a gangster but Victor has softened and can’t go through with it. The unlikely trio team up and await the inevitable showdown with an unhappy client. Pierre Salvadori’s wickedly funny crime caper features superb central performances with the deadpan Jean Rochefort in one of hsi greatest roles. One of the standout French comedies of the Nineties and now the subject of a British remake.