Grosse Pointe Blank

Dark comedy, romance, action, sheer style, witty dialogue and great acting.

"I'm drawing a complete blank"

How do you best sum up the 1997 movie Grosse Pointe Blank? It's one of those films that seems to have something of everything - dark comedy, romance, action, sheer style, witty dialogue and great acting. If you've not seen this movie go hunt it down, if you have join us as we return to Grosse Pointe.

Main Characters:

"I'm Martin Blank, remember me? I'm not married, I don't have any kids, and I'd blow your head off if someone paid me enough"

Martin Blank(John Cusack) is invited to his ten year High School reunion, the chance for him to see again the love of his life, the girl he stood up on prom night. However what can he tell her? He doesn't exactly have a lot in common with his former classmates. While they went on to respectable jobs, Martin became a professional killer!

But being a hitman is losing it's appeal , the stressed out Martin is making the life of his shrink (the excellent Alan Arkin) a misery, so Martin decides that he'll take one last job. A job that just happens to lead him back home to Grosse Pointe and to that reunion ...

GPB is very much a John Cusack film, as well as the starring role he co-produced the film with Steve Pink and shared screenplay credit with Pink, Tom Jankiewicz and D.V. DeVincentis.

Talk Back

I've been a Cusack fan since the likes of The Journey of Natty Gann and The Sure Thing. There's something extra to his performance in GPB though. Martin is so dead-pan, but funny at the same time. Oh & very appealing - I can quite appreciate Debi's reaction to him ;-)

Maybe it's just the clothes, and the styling of the character, but I felt that with this movie Cusack had, at long last, really grown-up. In many of his more recent movies I'd still see signs of the late teen/twenty- something of his movies from the mid to late '80's. The innocent look is still there to some extent but now he looks as if he's lived a bit too. Then again, it's maybe just me accepting that I'm older too![More]

Talk Back