Between the entire Bourne series, last year's dark comedy In Bruges, and now this spring's romantic suspense The Merry Gentleman, I'm really starting to develop a soft spot for the hitman story. Sure, hitmen may be coldblooded killers, but as Jason Bourne has shown us, at their core is an ordinary man just like you and me. They may be trained to take lives without question, mercy, or compassion, but as Martin McDonough's Ray and Ken so hilariously and poignantly revealed, even the most consummate professionals struggle with guilt and want to believe in second chances. And as we see when Frank Logan's (Michael Keaton) series of hits is interrupted by a young woman who is always looking up even when everything is looking down, in a world where both absolute judgment and undeserved mercy both exist, even hit men get thrown a bit off balance.

Although the trailer for Michael Keaton's The Merry Gentleman reveals little about the two self-proclaimed "private" characters at its center, within the first five minutes of the film, their mysterious secrets are pretty much laid out before us. Kate Frazier (Kelly McDonald) may be living alone and working as a secretary in Philadelphia by the movie's fifteen-minute mark, but when the movie opens she is nursing a black eye given to her by her police officer husband. Frank may spend his days working as a tailor in a men's suit shop, but on his nights off, he is more likely to be found carrying out a hit in a dark alley. Cue a movie about chance encounters, timely justice, unexpected pardons, and the very real and slightly confounding possibility that luck and chance have nothing to do with it at all.

From the beginning, The Merry Gentlemen sets itself up to explore the ideas of condemnation, grace, and redemption. In Frank's world, events generally unfold according to the idea that those who find themselves on the other end of his gun had it coming. As a hit says when Frank arrives to find that the he has already set his own death into motion, "I knew you'd come." As a police officer comments when he discovers a criminal who has hung himself, "A guy doesn't do this if he's innocent." And holding a gun to his own head after one hit and standing on the edge of a rooftop after another, as Frank reveals, according to such logic, he should probably be dead too. Even outside the hit world, the idea that bad deeds result in punishment and good deeds result in reward is pinpointed with the age-old Christmas stereotype; as Kate tells Frank when he helps her from underneath her Christmas tree and remarks that he found a girl underneath a tree, "Well, you must have been a very good boy."

But despite the fact that most would not consider Frank to be a "very good boy," every time Frank tries to off himself, things just don't quite work out. As chance would have it, Kate, the one woman who looks up at falling snowflakes when she leaves work, sees him about to jump and stops him. Although Frank appears nearly alone in this world, on the night his own body conspires to take him, Kate is once again nearby to make sure he doesn't make a premature exit. As a cop tells Kate, "You know that guy just doesn't know how lucky he was." Or as Kate's coworker puts it as she concludes her description of the night's events, "&ellips;and then the hand of God reached out."

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