cult film freak: CHARLES BRONSON, JILL IRELAND & JAN GAN BOYD 'ASSASSINATION'

Charles Bronson & Jan Gan Boyd Year: 1988 Rates: ***1/2

Jill Ireland's last collaboration after many with husband Charles Bronson gives her her biggest role as a bratty First Lady goading head of Secret Service Bronson with mind-games and media ploys, providing a NORTH BY NORTHWEST style road adventure that pays off with gun and bazooka fights, car and motorcycle chases along with exploding yachts and helicopters...

Bronson and Ireland have good chemistry along a rural road with assassins around every bend or waiting armed inside farmhouses...

Jan Gan Boyd in ASSASSINATION

Meanwhile the young ingenue is Jan Gan Boyd, an Asian agent whose lustful one-night-stand with boss Bronson is hilariously forced... But for the action, she should have been his partner alongside Jill Ireland, because she really sells it as an agent...

Bronson looked a gruff-ready forty when he was really fifty in DEATH WISH (the start of his A-list career) but here resembles a graying bobcat caught in a bear-trap...

Jill Ireland in ASSASSINATION

But not for the hands-on fight scenes which he's still pretty decent at; his experienced character knowing what will happen next despite Ireland's tantrums to the contrary, and, while it's great seeing her proven wrong again and again, her intentionally annoying persona gets far too annoying as she continuously refuses to listen or believe...

Then again it's when both know and trust each other enough that the movie works. It just should have happened a lot sooner.

Interview with JAN GAN BOYD on working with Charles Bronson in Assassination

JAN GAN BOYD: "I LOVED working with Charlie, he is soft spoken, handsome, kind, has a funny sense of humor not mean but sarcastic, and we became great friends meeting for lunch every few month...

"Cannon was a lower budget company...They paid me well, but their production costs were half of what MGM paid and when the money ran out... they said you have less then one week to finish the film, that’s why the action scene in Lake Tahoe ended so abruptly."