Call it the best dinner-party story ever: "Once, on a business trip, I met an honest-to-God hit man who showed me how to kill a guy and get away with it."

		The Matador Rating: R for strong sexual content and language. Starring: Pierce Brosnan, Greg Kinnear. Director: Richard Shepard.

That's what Greg Kinnear's Mister Average had been telling his wife and friends for years, until the grizzled, gaunt and broken assassin shows up at his door one night asking that the family man repay an old favor.

Writer-director Richard Shep- ard's dark comic drama begins like a James Bond movie: There's Pierce Brosnan waking up under the covers next to a sexy playmate. But Shepard quickly nips the Bond in the bud. With a complete absence of 007 debonair, Brosnan treats her like the tart that she is and uses her nail polish to absentmindedly paint his toenails.

Ironically named Julian Noble, he's an ignoble bum and everything James Bond never was: amoral, out of control, kind of a pathetic loser -- the kind of bad guy that other bad guys love to hate. The irony of "The Matador" is that former Bond Brosnan was able to find remarkable depth and humanity in a role that could easily have been two-dimensional. Noble murders for money, pays for cheap sex, scares children and rattles strangers with weirdly scary drunken tirades. Brosnan makes us love him nonetheless.

No one does squeaky-clean like Kinnear. When we meet his appropriately named Danny Wright, he's doing the right thing: checking into a Mexico City hotel to pursue a lucrative business deal that could put him and his family on Easy Street. He tries twice to walk away from the slurring drunk he meets at the bar but is kind or naive enough to accept his apology when he admits that he's just really lonely. Still a bit wary of Noble, Wright joins him at the bullfights the following afternoon and nags his odd new friend into revealing what he does for a living. To prove that he's a killer but not a liar, Nobel picks a man at random and shows Wright how easy it would be to take his life and take off without getting caught.

Once he gets the golly-gee excitement over meeting a real hit man out of his system, Wright makes a confession of his own. He's on the verge of losing the deal of a lifetime. If only he could turn it all around, find some way to remove his competition from the picture ...

"The Matador" is rife with twists, turns to flashbacks to fill in vital missing details, and red herrings that are tossed out with abandon. It's not hard to follow; in fact, it's impossible to think too far ahead in Shepard's clever script.

Hope Davis is fun in the largest supporting role, but most of the movie is about the awkward chemistry linking the two unlikely friends. As he did in the creepy "Auto Focus," Kinnear convincingly shows the dark possibilities lurking behind a crystalline exterior.

At one time, Brosnan seemed born to play Bond, even when that knock-off "Remington Steele" gig got in the way. He's played bad guys since, most notably in "The Tailor of Panama," which landed him a Golden Globe nomination. What Brosnan does with this role would seem remarkable for any actor. But going from the definition of debonair to dirty and dissolute shows incredible range, more than many ever thought Brosnan could muster.

"Matador" is playing at Loews and Squirrel Hill.