HIP YOUNG MAN WITH A GUN

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The concept couldn't be higher--that is to say, simpler: a professional assassin goes to his high school reunion. Ha-ha. Can't you just see the double takes when Martin Q. Blank (John Cusack) tells all those suburban housewives and real estate salesmen what he's been doing since graduation?

But Grosse Pointe Blank, its title punning nicely on a famously grim movie about a hit man, is not a one-joke comedy. Nor is it, despite its Disney auspices, cozy family fun. In its soft-spoken way, it is fierce, shaggy and deeply weirded out.

For Martin is a haunted man. What's put him on the couch of Alan Arkin's understandably nervous psychiatrist is lack of job satisfaction--killing the President of Paraguay with a fork just isn't the kick it might once have been--and the fact that he still pines for his high school sweetheart, whom he stood up without explanation on their long-ago prom night. Since she is played by the divine Minnie Driver--now working as a disk jockey but still smitten, it turns out, and still warily available--his feelings are understandable.

But Martin is also a hunted man, mostly by Dan Aykroyd's Grocer, a goofily rational rival determined either to bring him into a hired killers' union that he is intent on forming or, failing that, to off the competition. Curiously enough, Grocer and his henchmen blend quite easily into the suburban scene. Grosse Pointe may have grander homes and less snow than, say, Fargo, but spiritually they are sister cities--places where everyone tries to maintain an air of chipper blandness in the face of postmodernism's disorder.

People there pop pills to raise their depressed spirits. They cover their paranoia with clenched-jaw politesse. They don't quite understand Martin's dismay when he discovers that his boyhood home has been replaced by a convenience store--where the clerk gets so lost in a noisy video game that he fails to notice a real-life gun battle breaking out in his aisles. Therein lies this movie's fundamental irony: anarchy may bloom from Martin's gun barrel, but unlike his old pals, he is not in denial about it. He is still trying to nurture the shoots of old-fashioned squareness that remain rooted in his soul.

Cusack is one comically cool dude, and the movie, which he and some of his high school pals helped write, is directed with sly sobriety by George Armitage. For once, a big studio has apparently let some smart people run free, and the result is as fresh, funny and acute as any Sundance winner. See, guys, you can do it; you just have to loosen the reins a little.

--By Richard Schickel