One signal of a terrific actor is that he can maintain you even when he’s not doing something. Pierce Brosnan is like that. I wouldn’t name him a minimalist, although he by no means wastes a phrase or a motion; he has the precision of an costly watch. But as he’s gotten older (he’s now 70, with silver hair), his inside high quality of stylish puckish cutthroat gravitas has solely grown stronger. You’re hooked by him when he’s not doing something partly as a result of he initiatives the unwavering confidence that you’ll be.

That makes him the perfect actor to play a seen-it-all hit man — who additionally occurs to be a extremely civilized connoisseur prepare dinner — in Phillip Noyce’s “Fast Charlie,” a Deep South crime drama that could be the twelfth film this 12 months to heart on successful man. However the brand new hit-man motion pictures, like David Fincher’s “The Killer” and Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man,” aren’t standard thrillers. They’re character research with existential underpinnings (which brings them full circle again to the primary and nonetheless biggest instance of the shape, “The Day of the Jackal”).

“Quick Charlie” is a modest style film, and that’s what’s good about it. The veteran director Phillip Noyce brings it in at 90 minutes (a uncommon feat today), and he phases it as a neatly unfolding tick-tock journey, so that every plot swivel arrives in time to take you someplace. And Brosnan retains the movie grounded, at all times convincing you there’s one thing at stake. He performs Charlie Swift, who has spent 32 years working for Stan (performed by the late James Caan in his remaining function), a now-ancient mobster who can be his good friend. Charlie lives in an unassuming residential neighborhood of Biloxi, Miss., in a house that’s tastefully furnished with antiques. He’s a Marine veteran who likes to unwind by making Italian meals (he was stationed in Italy), and he’s the important thing member of Stan’s ball-busting crew.

Brosnan speaks with an accent that’s a fusion of his personal silvery brogue and a gruff drawl. It’s not an accent that’s going to win any awards for authenticity, but it’s sonorous and expressive; it really works. It makes Charlie, in his means, an unique character — a gentleman shitkicker. Tailored from Victor Gischler’s novel “Gun Monkeys” (the script is by Richard Wenk), “Quick Charlie” is about what occurs when Charlie’s moderately comfy life as a Mob killer and fixer will get torn aside in a single day. A rival gangster, Beggar Mercado (Gbenda Akinnagbe), compromised by one in every of Sam’s goons, decides to whack Sam and his complete squad, and he nearly succeeds; he’s received the boys and the muscle. However it’s Charlie, underneath his debonair floor, who’s received the ice-pick perspective, together with the desire to outlive.

Charlie is a bit just like the James Caan character in “Thief,” with a dream that sustains him: He needs to purchase a fixer-upper in Tuscany and retire there. What’s stopping him? He doesn’t wish to do it alone. Enter Marcie Kramer (Morena Baccarin), the ex-wife of the loser who tried to rat Beggar out. (He received what was coming to him.) She has tried to remain above the fray (actually, in an remoted home on stilts), and when Charlie seeks her out, the very best factor about their connection is what an off-the-cuff gradual burn it’s. Baccarin, who’s from Rio de Janeiro, has a dreamy-eyed perkiness that syncs up with Brosnan’s reticent valor. When the 2 head to New Orleans to search out the proof Marcie’s ex was hiding, they are saying rather a lot with out saying all that a lot.

Noyce, the director of such disparate motion pictures as “Useless Calm,” “Salt,” and “Above Suspicion,” has at all times been a fastidious filmmaker, and in an age of made-for-streaming motion comedy that appears to spill over the perimeters of its personal wretched extra, you’re grateful for his old-school craftsmanship, which now seems like rigor. In “Quick Charlie,” he streamlines the motion with out hyping it, makes poetic use of helicopter establishing photographs, and phases a scene worthy of the primary “Bourne” movie by which Charlie hides out from an murderer in a lodge laundry chute, squeezing in opposition to its sides to maintain from sliding down, a process that turns into appreciably tougher when the murderer, a relentless ogre often known as the Freak (Christopher Matthew Cook dinner), fires his gun up the chute and hits Charlie within the thigh.   

The ability of that scene, like a lot of the remainder of the movie, is all within the timing. There may be ability, as properly, within the quirks and the small print, like Charlie and Stan arguing over whether or not Charlie put cilantro within the rooster, or the “Semper Fi” that unites Charlie and the membership bouncer (David Chattam) who reveals as much as assist him at simply the correct second, or the truth that Marcie is an aspiring (and ardent) taxidermist. “Quick Charlie” is minor, however Noyce, to the tip, is aware of simply what he’s doing. That used to appear like much less of a novelty.