The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then the Bigfoot review – dreary fantasy

A title as odd as this one makes a contract with the prospective viewer. It leads you to expect great or at least interesting things, like a surreal mashup of historical speculative fiction and pulpy, yeti-themed horror. Alas, while the protagonist does indeed kill Hitler and then bigfoot (please don’t complain about that being a spoiler – it’s in the title), this is nevertheless a bizarrely dreary, melancholy film in which little else happens.

Sam Elliott, an actor best known for his gravelly quasi-Texan drawl and an iconic moustache that arguably deserves its own credit, plays laconic loner Calvin Barr, a man haunted by memories. Yes, one of them is of how he infiltrated German ranks during the second world war and killed Hitler, an act revealed in a pretty perfunctory flashback wherein Calvin is played by Aidan Turner. (Apparently the Germans just replaced Hitler with a lookalike, which shows just how powerful moustaches are.)

But he’s much more troubled by reveries of his lost love (Caitlin FitzGerald, underused despite how good she is in TV series Masters of Sex) to whom he failed to propose properly before he was shipped out on his Hitler-killing assignment. And then years later, once Turner has got an appropriately shaped moustache affixed and aged into Elliott, Calvin lives a lonely life with his golden retriever and an empty house in some small town. Suddenly, the government, incarnated by Ron Livingston in a suit with an American flag tie pin, comes looking for him. It seems Calvin is the only man in the world immune to some movie-plot plague, so they need him and his special assassination skills to save humanity by killing a plague-infected bigfoot. Which he does.

In other words, this plays like the result of a mad challenge to write a screenplay using elements culled from a supermarket tabloid. Writer-director Robert D Krzykowski uses a series of increasingly tenuous match cuts and lashings of soppy music to create some sense of coherence, while cast and crew play the whole thing with dead straight faces.

But we’re not fooled. This is an elaborate Dadaist joke, the funniest part of which is that it’s not in the least bit funny.