This film is the equivalent of knowing you only have one erection left in your life. You awaken one day to find your cock fluttering weakly on the bottom of its Calvin Klein knock-off cage and panic. You have no money… of course you don’t… you’re a failure. In a moment of pure desperation you run into a church and, in the ensuing scuffle, stab the priest. You snatch up the poor box and run. You make it to the docks… You can feel all sensation beginning to fade below the waist. You have no choice. You grab the only whore you can afford. She’s sixty, wrinkled and liver-spotted, her arms burned by a hundred different pimps over the decades she’s been soullessly servicing. You get her home. You know it’s going to be wretched… but at least it’s something… it’s technically a hole. You wince as she stumbles, her glass right eye seeing better than the lazy left, and finally drops her underwear. You stare at her withered loins. You swear you spot either a neglected tampon string or a tapeworm.  
 You just go and jerk off to an old wallpaper sample.

 That’s this fucking wretched film in a pustulent nutshell.

 From the director of Driving Miss Daisy, a film I never watched and have absolutely no intention of watching, comes another film. It stars Morgan Freeman who appears to humouring a four year-old niece by letting her be his agent for a day and John Cusack who is now apparently old enough to play people’s dads. Steve Martin always looked fifty but had ten year-old children in his movies. John Cusack’s probably younger but  looks like an alcoholic and has a child old enough to have no excuses for his fucking hair. Ironically the child gets the only “fuck” I noticed in the movie and delivers it with all the fiery passion of a doctor informing you of your kidney stone diagnosis.
 
 I am pretty sure some other people said fuck but for some mysterious reason they were all crudely ADR’d to say such blasphemous monstrosities as “damn” and “curses”.
 
 I want it to be clear that I am only reviewing this film as I have nothing better to do and am absolutely outraged that nobody else has managed to summon enough rancour to write more than seven limp lines saying it wasn’t very good. This film deserves more than seven lines. It deserves at least eight. Those lines should be spiked with rat poison and be snorted off a razor-wire tight-rope suspended across a threshing machine.

 Several fascinating themes run through this film. One is the belief that anyone out there wanted to watch a film that somehow manages to be an inferior version of The River Wild. I did not believe it was possible to make an inferior version of The River Wild. Nobody ever liked that film. Nobody has ever done anything other than read a book for the last hour of it.

 Another interesting string to The Contract’s bow is that they appear to have hired the editors responsible for Caligula. Not the editors who vainly tried to stitch Caligula into a coherent film but the ones whose job it was to find as many places as possible to cut in unsettling hardcore pornography when nobody was looking. If an event actually occurs in the film it is guaranteed to be greeted with a gleeful amnesia by the cast. The narrative flow is a flow of rich, cheap, distressing bourbon leading to a series of black-out rapids and an eventual cleansing chunky waterfall that stains all it touches.
 
 The basic plot is fucking awful.

 I was considering leaving at that but since that’s already the biggest spoiler I’ll flesh it out.

 Morgan Freeman plays a loveable assassin. He is much like the Werther’s Original grandfather but with a tendency to throw someone we never learnt or cared about under a car in the first ten minutes of the film. This is meant to come as a shock to us because there is a musical cue that tells us it’s a shock. Freeman is assisted by four actors who appear to be friends of the caterer. While Freeman appears to be aware that he’s in a deeply, deeply shitty movie, the other four seem to think they’re starring in Heat. All four come with quirks. Demonstrating the Kafka-esque skill of the writers one of these characters’ quirks is “being black”. He may also have been intended to be “sassy”. Someone else’s quirk consists of listening to an iPod. Altman must be pained he died before he got to shout “I had ninety years… how could I have not thought of that?”

 Getting a paragraph to himself is… some guy who plays chess against a mysterious stranger. I think this is meant to imply he’s capable of rational thought. To remind us of this he continues to play chess as he runs through the woods in pursuit of Cusack. This is the only bit of the setup that is even mentioned again for the rest of the movie.

 The first hour is already fading from my mind but from what I recall Morgan Freeman is driving home from some form of murdering and gets involved in a car accident. This leads to him ending up in hospital. He is identified as “bad” when the nurses open his jacket and find a gun in a shoulder holster. Apparently this was entirely unnoticed by the paramedics and firemen who’d cut him from the car and obviously thrown him casually into the back of the ambulance. I imagine they all then went and got a sandwich while Freeman re-inflated his own lungs.

 For no fucking reason whatsoever they decide to take Morgan on a lovely drive through what other people inform me is Bulgaria pretending to be some fucking part of America with trees. As was spotted from the moment he got into the car it’s all doomed and his four quirky friends stage a truly stupid rescue. Morg’s car casually flies off a very light slope and ends up in a river. It begins to flood through a convenient bullet-hole while he romantically wrestles an FBI captor. Morg shoots the FBI bloke in the stomach but decides to rescue him because he’s Morgan Freeman and thus incapable of ever demonstrating he has testicles. I’m assuming the rescue was improvised and they left it in because Morgan told them a long story about a puppy he’d once owned.

 Freeman and the FBI bloke are washed down the river and conveniently right in front of John Cusack who is out walking his obnoxious cunt of a child through the woods in an attempt to conquer his terrible pot addiction. Cusack rescues the damp pair whereupon two becomes one when the fat FBI budget Brian Dennehey dies. His last words are used to tell Cusack to point a gun at Morgan Freeman and call the police.

 I hit my tooth on my mug at this point. During the painful twitching that resulted I let out a fart that had been brewing for quite a while. I get that way if I don’t sleep… something just… goes wrong down there. I also had a very shitty chicken burger from the single worst take-away place on Earth. It was one of those farts where you suddenly go “oh… shit”. You sprint to the toilet. You know it’s already too late. You just try to keep the boxers away from the trousers so maybe you can separate them before it soaks through and you have to wash both. I yanked down my trousers and flung myself onto the toilet. I winced and checked… nothing. There’s something so unsettling about phantom soiling.

 I’d not paused the movie during this time and when I came it was to find Cusack and son climbing down a cliff with Morgan. They then had to jump a crevasse that must have been at least a foot wide. The worthless child managed to somehow fail to clear a jump that he would have cleared by four feet if he’d just taken a normal step. Morgan saves him. Nothing comes of this other than yet another tedious underlining that Morgan Freeman is Jesus.

 There might have been a glimpse of tits as Child discovers an unsettling couple pricking about in a pool. The man is fully clothed because real men have sex through four layers of mountain clothing. However, shockingly, it is soon revealed that it’s not actually a man… it’s a stockbroker. Cue a return to the one other recurring theme of this movie… all city folk are effeminate gingers who complain about country folk’s incestual ways. Never did I think I would see a sympathetic take on the hillbilly rapists of Deliverance.  

 Of course we’re now stuck with girly-man and his ageing blonde seductress… right up until girly-man gets shot by the quirky gang as they attack our heroes in a helicopter. Blondie is over him before he hits the ground, doesn’t even check his pulse and, in a strangely unsettling way, is automatically upgraded to Cusack’s love-interest… I’m not exaggerating… Women are such whores.

 This shit goes on for a while. Somewhere between false-alarms two and three John Cusack was revealed to be both a gym teacher and an ex-copper. This means he can now shoot down the helicopter. I assume this means that if I remember I’m a sexual tyrannosaur I can fuck a young Kim Bassinger to death.

 Our plucky gang of hobbits go and hide in an incredibly obvious cabin where the scrawny piece of shit son once went “kayaking”. This is of course detected by chess-playing quirky man by the means of… really… there was no explanation… he just went something along the lines of “ah-hah” and they showed a little video clip of the cabin on his laptop. I suspect it was the result of googling “John Cusack, hiding”.

 There’s a bit of a stroppy slapping match as John Cusack and his new blonde bint beat to death and shoot respectively sassy guy and chess guy. John Cusack hits like a girl. An old girl.

 Remaining quirky guy turns on Freeman as was the super-secret conspiracy all along and Morgan buggers off with the obnoxious child. Hopefully during the time he spent keeping the boy captive he raped some trauma into him. Either way… blah blah blah blah blah final half hour. Morgan Freeman anti-hero-ness. Son rescued. Some random fucking fat bastard almost got shot… remaining quirky got shot. Fucking die movie. Fucking die.

 End of.

 Oh, apart from the yokel police spewing some yokel wit and the city folk all being warned to be nice to John Cusack by Morgan Freeman.
 The final scene involves a barbecue where they have of course invited the blonde woman. It appears that all of six hours or so have passed since her bloke was shot and she’s probably still got bits of his intestine under her fingernails. You get the feeling she’s going to use those very same fingernails to flick herself off while Cusack licks the back of his own knees because “he’s such a versatile actor”.

Absolute cunt of a movie.