Artists in Agony: Hitmen at the Coda Teahouse (2021) User Reviews

Fun, dark, clever, and REALLY funny

[bernatd · 9/10 · 24 January 2024]

This may not be the first "Documentary Crew Follows A Group Of Hitmen" movie, but it's easily the best and funniest iteration yet.

The movie is set in a world where hitmen (known as 'Artists') are well known public figures, complete with fawning super fans, magazine articles that rank their popularity, acolyte podcasts... seemingly an endless stream of hilarious and imaginative details that illuminate a fun and fully-realized world.

Every multi-media cutaway, business name, hitman profile... you name it, it's all darkly humorous, and keeps the viewer laughing from start to finish. Even the subtitles are self-referential and funny.

Excited to see what the filmmakers do next!

Great idea

[BandSAboutMovies · 3/10 · 4 September 2022]

This mockumentary follows four hitpeople who all died in the infamous Coda Teahouse Massacre: Frosty (Jason Frost), a new father balancing killing with child-rearing; stay-at-home mother Lucien Mercy (Ariadne Shaffer); Red Rick (Pall McQueen, but there's also a musical version played by Paul Byrne) and his apprentice Lady Faith (Kate Huffman, but again, there's a musical version of this character played by Liz Fenning).

A documentary crew has been following each of them to this final moment and shows how things got here and just how everything got so out of hand. The entire doc is narrated by ex-CIA Agent Jonathan Sully (Chance Hand) and explains how the greatest artist -- as this movie refers to killers for money -- Rockstar (Frank Kitchin) just may have killed them all.

Director Kenneth Lui has an interesting concept here and excels at the action scenes in this. It just feels like so many ideas and the mockumentary format keeps getting broken so that we're in the loop on every thought of every character instead of letting the action play itself out. It also feels way longer than its runtime, as every time it feels like it's nearing a moment of clarity or resolution, there's still so much longer to go.