Ace British character actor Bill Nighy (“Pirate Radio”) teams up with the ever-delicious Emily Blunt in Jonathan Lynn’s “Wild Target,” an eccentric little comic thriller filled with enough laughs that I was mostly willing to overlook the fact that it makes virtually no sense as a thriller.
Having great fun playing against his usual wild-and-crazy types, Nighy is Victor, a middle-aged, highly-paid hit man who is such a fussbudget that his own elderly mother (Eileen Atkins) wonders if her never-married son has gay “tendencies.”
Victor has been hired by a real estate mogul, Ferguson (Rupert Everett), to take out Rose (Blunt), a glamorous swindler who sold the mogul a fake Rembrandt.
The planned assassination in a garage is interrupted by the arrival of a second hit man — who is shot to death by Tony (Rupert Grint), a not-so-innocent bystander who was burgling cars.
For reasons that neither Victor nor Lucinda Coxon’s script (based on a French film) can adequately explain, Victor decides to flee with Rose and Tony to a hotel, where their room turns out to be down the hall from Ferguson’s.
The trio improbably decamps to Victor’s home in the countryside, where the furniture has plastic coverings and his invalid mom pops in from the nursing home at opportune moments.
At one point, it’s suggested that Victor is sexually attracted to the pot-smoking, frequently shirtless Tony — who doesn’t seem to be at all interested in Rose.
That idea is quickly dropped, though, in favor of a more conventional (if equally improbable) romance between Victor and the reckless Rose.
There are several well-staged chases and comic set pieces devised by Lynn, a Brit who is best-known in this country for “My Cousin Vinny” and “The Whole Nine Yards.”
Lynn provides nice change-of-pace roles for Blunt (trapped in period roles in “The Young Victoria” and “The Wolfman”) and Grint, who seems to enjoy channeling Jon Heder during this vacation from his decade-long stint as Ron Weasley in the “Harry Potter” series.
If you are willing to check your brain at the popcorn stand, you can have a lot of fun watching “Wild Target.”