28-year-old Martin Q. Blank (John Cusack) is going home. To Grosse Pointe, Michigan for the 10-year High School reunion. Initially reluctant (he vanished on the eve of Prom, his whereabouts an enduring mystery), he's landed a job locally. Two birds with one stone.

What he finds disgusts him. The family home has been razed to make way for an Ultramart ("You can never go home, but you can shop there"), his mother is a gibbering wreck, and almost to a man his old buddies are either killers or vultures: estate agents, private cops, insurance salesmen. This angers Martin more than most, perhaps because he too is a killer. Albeit literally.

Grosse Pointe Blank is George Armitage's first film since the deliciously vinegary Miami Blues over seven years ago. Co-written by Cusack, the screenplay crackles with more wit and invention than a dozen Hollywood high-concepts. Even Blank's (rather obvious) name is there for a lovely crack at the painfully observed reunion - an insipid school hall dance affair that fair drips with petty rivalry and flabby ambition; Pretty In Pink: The Resentment Years.

Cusack is fine, sufficiently boyish in black and yet paradoxically cold-blooded enough for a professional hitman. His comic timing is a joy. Briton Minnie Driver is Debi, Martin's other reason to for returning, abandoned in a $700 dollar Prom dress when he upped and disappeared. The two make for a sparky, likeable and above all believable couple.

Elsewhere Dan Ackroyd shows that dumper-bound career of his may not all his own doing as Martin's rival who wants to set up a hitman union ("Will there be meetings?" Cusack wants to know). He's good and veteran Alan Arkin even better as Martin's therapist Dr. Oatman, a man so scared he takes neither notes nor payment.

The scoring is by ex-Clash man Joe Strummer at co-producer Cusack's invite, and his old band turn-up several times on the retro-pop drenched soundtrack - songs used, thank god, to do more than just flog CDs. Driver, who works for a local radio station, declares an all vinyl 80s weekend, and the choices are either on the nose (Tones On Tail!) or tastily ironic (Echo and The Bunnymen's 'The Killing Moon', anyone?) Even an apparent faux pas like Guns'n'Roses' execrable recast of 'Live and Let Die' hides a dynamite pay-off. Certainly Nena's absurdist Euro-cheese anthem '99 Luftballons' will never cut-up quite the same again.

Grosse Pointe Blank is obviously more commercially minded than Armitage's last and consequently lacks the sheer bloody-minded spite that made the Charles Willeford adaptation just so damn treasurable. But even so, its heart is suitably black, its targets meticulous, and, most of all, it's genuinely funny. In the current desert of Hollywood-humour, it more than punches its weight.