General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Assassins (1995 film)

Assassins is a 1995 American-French action thriller directed by Richard Donner and starring Sylvester Stallone, Antonio Banderas, and Julianne Moore, written by the Wachowskis and Brian Helgeland and released by Warner Bros.¹^•² Stallone plays Robert Rath, a veteran contract killer who wants to retire, and Banderas plays Miguel Bain, a volatile younger rival who keeps killing Rath's targets and then hunts Rath himself; Moore plays Electra, a computer hacker who becomes Rath's target and love interest.¹^•³

Key fact	Detail
Release	Wide release October 6, 1995, by Warner Bros.; running time 132 minutes; rated R for violence and language⁴
Cast	Sylvester Stallone (Robert Rath), Antonio Banderas (Miguel Bain), Julianne Moore (Electra)¹
Writers	Story and screenplay by Lilly and Lana Wachowski (credited as Larry and Andy), with Brian Helgeland⁵
Box office	$30,303,072 domestic on a $50,000,000 budget; $53,000,000 international; $83,306,268 worldwide³^•⁴
Critical reception	18% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (9 fresh, 42 rotten of 51 reviews); 45% on the audience Popcornmeter from more than 50,000 ratings¹
Filming	Shot in the Seattle-Tacoma-Everett (Puget Sound) area of Washington State, with ending scenes in Puerto Rico²

Spoilers

Plot

Robert Rath is a paid assassin who wants out of the business, haunted by the memory of apparently murdering his own mentor Nicolai years earlier.¹² On an assignment to kill a mobster at a funeral, he watches another killer, Miguel Bain, complete the hit first, with innocent bystanders killed. A contractor then offers Rath one last job that would let him retire: killing four Dutch buyers and a computer hacker named Electra, and retrieving a disk of sensitive information. Rath falls for Electra, becomes a marked man himself, and must trust his enemy to survive.²^•¹

Script and production

The Wachowskis' spec script. The original screenplay was written by Larry and Andy Wachowski, who had moved from writing comic books into screenwriting. They sold it to producer Joel Silver for a reported million dollars, around the time he bought their script for The Matrix for the same price.² Before that, the blockbuster producer Dino De Laurentiis had optioned the script while the brothers were renovating their parents' house, and then sold it to Warner Bros. for five times what he had paid.⁶ Larry Wachowski later described the basic concept as based on the metaphor of chess, with the lead character stuck in an unwinnable game he keeps playing anyway.⁷

Rewrites and credits. According to Lana Wachowski, substantial revisions by a hired writer removed what she called "all the subtext, the visual metaphors . . . the idea that within our world there are moral pocket universes that operate differently." When the film was made, the Wachowskis tried to get their names taken off the credits but failed; the script nevertheless earned them a deal with Warner Bros., after which they quit construction work and became full-time filmmakers.⁶ Brian Helgeland shares the writing credit on the finished film.⁵

Crew and filming. Donner produced the film with Joel Silver, Bruce Evans, Andrew Lazar, and others; Vilmos Zsigmond was the cinematographer, Richard Marks the editor, and Tom Sanders the production designer.⁵^•¹ Principal photography took place in the Seattle-Tacoma-Everett metropolitan area of Washington State, with the ending scenes shot in Puerto Rico, including a Dia de los Muertos procession crossing the streets of San Juan.² Donner, speaking to reporters during shooting in the Seattle area in April 1995, called it an "existential action film."

Reception and box office

The film opened October 6, 1995 in 2,343 theaters and earned $9,378,637 on its opening weekend, about 30.9 percent of its eventual domestic total of roughly $30.3 million.⁴^•³ With $53 million internationally, the worldwide total of about $83.3 million was 1.7 times the $50 million production budget.⁴ In the United Kingdom it reached number 4 on the chart and grossed £1,772,801 over three weeks.⁸ Warner Home Video released it on video on October 1, 1997.⁴

Critics. The film was poorly received: 42 of 51 reviews counted on Rotten Tomatoes were negative, for an 18 percent Tomatometer, while audiences were warmer at 45 percent on the Popcornmeter.¹ Roger Ebert, the longtime Chicago Sun-Times critic, panned it in a review dated October 6, 1995, writing that the movie is "filled with such preposterous impossibilities" and cataloguing plot mechanics that he said violated logic and physics.⁹ Todd McCarthy's review in Variety was more favorable toward Banderas, writing that he "bounces and gesticulates all over the screen, injecting some welcome humour into the proceedings"; a later academic study of Banderas's action roles notes that the film was poorly received but that his energetic performance emerged unscathed.¹⁰

Place in the Wachowskis' careers

Although the film itself was described by a Los Angeles Times reporter in 1999 as "a rather indifferent Sylvester Stallone vehicle," producer Joel Silver and Warner Bros. production chief Lorenzo di Bonaventura cited it as the promise they had seen in the brothers' first script.¹¹ The screenplay's sale gave the Wachowskis their Warner Bros. deal and the financial footing to write The Matrix, whose first script they completed by 1994.⁶ A WIRED book excerpt on The Matrix's legacy reports that the finished film was "a shock to the Wachowskis" and that on one version of the screenplay they wrote the warning "This is the sex scene, and we're not cutting it."

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026