The word ass appears twice in the movie title Assassins; maybe its a tip-off to prospective viewers, maybe it’s an abbreviated list of the cast, or maybe it’s just a contrived coincidence, like the film’s entire plot. Whatever the case, this motion picture has to be one of the biggest disappointments of the fall. It promises a dark battle between two masters of subtle violence, but delivers a story full of inconsistency and lifeless dialogue.

After a promising opening scene Robert Rath (Sylvester Stallone) and a captive on a grim march through a swamp to an execution site the film gets mired in predictability. Contrived situations and dialogue methodically explain an extremely obvious plot. Even the action scenes seem to drag on with no real surprises, just many frames of two killers peering around corners and shooting at each other.

Rath is an assassin weary of the long hours, low pay and monotony he faces in the day-to-day grind of killing people. Or something like that. Since he is supposedly the best assassin in the world, the part of his job that really turns him off is never made clear. But he’ll do one more job on a guy in a wheelchair no less to make a little retirement cash.

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Enter Miguel Bain (Antonio Banderas), the number two hit-man. Bain is the opposite of Rath, enthusiastic and ambitious, hoping to become everything Rath wants to leave behind. Bain hits Rath’s intended victim and makes an elaborate yet supposedly impromptu getaway, escaping handcuffs and a moving police car in the film’s only entertaining action sequence.

Banderas brings a mythical quality to his performances, and I had hopes for him here; unfortunately, the writers spent too much of Banderas’ on-screen time proving how inferior his assassin is to Stallone’s. Still, for the first half of the film the villain steals the show, a far more interesting character than the battle-worn, depressed tough-guy clich Stallone plays.

Some humanity and a little comic relief is supplied by the reclusive, cat loving high-tech industrial spy Electra (Juliane Moore). Electra is, in her own words, a ghost, with no social security number, address or identification. Both hit-men are assigned to kill her, and both easily find her, though the script never explains how. The rest of the film involves Electra and Rath negotiating the sale of information Electra has stored on a disk, as Bain relentlessly tracks them to South America where they fight it out in a climax that, like the rest of the film, lasts way too long.

The pictures are pretty and occasionally captivating, especially the final scenes in San Juan. But Assassins’ producers do not seem to understand that some viewers go to the movies to see a good story if we want beautiful imagery without plot, we can watch cologne commercials.

Assassins gets four out of ten stars. When the script allows, Moore and Banderas give decent performances, and Vilmos Zsigmond’s photography is attractive, even stunning in a few scenes. Too bad their talents were exceptions to the norm in this listless thriller, thanks to a predictable script with little concern for character development or believability.