Charles Bronson plays Secret Service Agent Jay Killion. For a guy like Bronson, who became synonymous in the last two and a half decades of his career with movies featuring exorbitant body counts, playing a man named “Killion” is amusing enough. But Killion has an even funnier nickname, “Killy.” KILLY! His coworkers call him this! Calling a guy this proficient at firing an Uzi while driving a motorcycle and keeping his hair in place “Killy” is just perverse.

On the eve of the 1989 inauguration, Killion is assigned to protect “One Mama” also known as First Lady Lara Royce Craig (Jill Ireland, Bronson’s real life spouse). Obviously, this is a fictional woman with no relation to any real First Lady. Yet strangely, ASSASSINATION decides to make numerous references to the former (or at the time the film was released, current) First Lady Nancy Reagan. Killion himself notes how much he misses protecting her. Since the filmmakers chose to ground the film in our universe I can’t help but compare the gorgeous Jill Ireland, who plays the First Lady in 1989 and our real First Lady in 1989, Mrs. Barbara Bush, who looks like a man.

In the inaugural parade, a policeman’s motorcycle blows a tire and explodes. At first everyone but Killion is convinced it was an accident. Hey it sounds reasonable; lots of policeman’s motorcycle tires explode ten feet away from the most powerful woman in the world. Craig refuses to believe anyone would want to kill her. Rather than erring on the side of caution, she decides to continually puts herself in harm’s way. So she slips her protection and heads to California where she has a boat docked she wants to take out on the ocean. Killion refuses to let her board until the ship has been properly checked. She impatiently refuses. Screw proper security measures; she wants to board the boat and die now! Immediately after she tells Killion that her boat is “perfectly safe!” it explodes in a huge fireball that kills everyone onboard. Not the sharpest point in the crayon box, she doesn’t even want to return to Washington, she wants to stay and help clear wreckage and look for survivors. Sorry lady, DEATH WISH was a different Bronson movie.

When Killion is off-duty, he makes time with a fellow agent named Charlotte (Jan Gan Boyd). This attractive woman, at least twenty-five years Killion’s junior, is head over heals for this insensitive, violent, and dare I say, physically repugnant man. He rebuffs her advances because of the business-and-pleasure principle, then later reverses himself and sleeps with her. After their one night of apparent toe-curling ecstasy (I don’t buy it either), she asks him to move in with her. In the next scene, before they’ve slept together a second time or even kissed each other, she proposes they get married. After one date? Charlotte, what did your therapist tell you? Surprisingly, Killion’s not put off by her stalker-style possessiveness. He laughs it off and tells her they can’t move in together because, “I don’t want to die from a terminal orgasm!” Too much information Killy.

When the assassination attempts keep coming, Killion and Craig sneak away and go on a cross-country jaunt to evade her captors. That’s right, instead of sticking the First Lady in a secure location where she can be protected and kept out of harm’s way, she goes out on the road with no help but Bronson, who is too good at killing people in extremely vicious ways to stay out of sight for very long. Not to mention that the First Lady disappears and nobody seems to notice. One of the most famous women in the country travels Greyhound without a disguise (she buys a wig then never wears it!) and only one person recognizes her, but not well enough to accurately identify her. Don’t you think if you bumped into Laura Bush - even if she was sitting in the passenger seat of a neon yellow dune buggy, as Mrs. Craig does at one point - you’d at least do a double take?

The terrorists keep on coming and keep on failing in their inept attempts to kill this death-crazed nut and Bronson and his legion of stunt doubles, who don’t even have the star’s hair color or style, continually foil their plans. These generic terrorist guys, they’re all the same, just out for some easy money. “Terrorism is a very expensive game!” one warns. At these rates, I’d rather have played Scrabble. Bronson even kills the final villain with a gun we have seen him give away and never retrieve.

This whole mess is laughable, laughable enough to recommend as an ugly movie in the right context. In this case, nonsense is good sense. It’s just common sense, simple common sense.