This Ends Tonight #2 // Review
The rest of the girls are commenting on Beth’s skill. A single shot right to the head of the target. The rest of the girls are commenting on how she might be a good pick for the family business...if she can only survive her bachelorette party. How hard could that be, really? Beth is about to find out in This Ends Tonight #2. Writer Gerry Duggan reaches the midpoint of an enjoyable evening in Las Vegas with artist Jae Lee. It’s a “B” action movie lovingly translated for the comics page. Not everything fits perfectly, but it does a good job of shooting around the page with some appealing characters.
There’s no way that the place could have a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher, though, right? It’s a gun range that calls itself “Shoot Your Load.” There’s no way it could possibly be the type of place capable of getting something like that. All of the girls agree and they would know: they’re all highly-trained assassins. Pink-haired Fiona can dream, though. For a little while at least. There are assassins out after them and there’s a sizable amount of money involved. A shooting range outside of Las Vegas isn’t exactly the safest place for them to find themselves.
Duggan takes cheesy action movie tropes and moves them around the page with great efficiency. Each of the ladies involved in the combat all come across just distinct enough to make her own distinctive mark on the page, but since there really isn’t much difference from one to the next with respect to the overall plot, the central ensemble of heroes feels a bit homogenous. That’s one of the bigger challenges with any squad-based action story. The serialized comic book format makes it that much more tricky to distinguish between characters while everything is blowing-up, but Duggan does a pretty good job of this without unduly slowing-down the overall action on the page.
Once again, Jae Lee shows considerable flair for bringing sexy action to the page that glides from panel to panel with great grace. It doesn’t always feel like it’s making a hell of a lot of sense when it comes to overall physics, but everything on the page DOES feel internally consistent and that’s really the important thing. If there’s a problem with Lee’s art it might lie in the fact that the series still hasn’t found the distinctive feel of Las Vegas. There are aspects and elements of the story that are clearly set in the place, but the distinctly surreal feel of the lights and architecture don’t really feel all that present on the page.
The premise IS a lot of fun and there’s no questioning that it could work remarkably well under the right circumstances, btu Lee and Duggan aren’t quite tapping into the distinct fun that could come out of the central conflict. There’s a bachelorette party attended by a group of young assassins who are all being hunted down by OTHER assassins. And the bride-to-be is totally oblivious to it all because she’s got bigger things on her mind and is perfectly okay with things getting a little wild. There’s real potential in that idea that Duggan and Lee aren’t quite attaining.
