And yet somehow Mr. Nighy’s scrupulous control and Ms. Blunt’s wild mischief are more likely to make you wish you could see them doing something else, something other than zigzagging through yet another weary exercise in comic mayhem.

The director, Jonathan Lynn, has written a lot of British television, some of it good, and directed a few enjoyable movies (notably “My Cousin Vinny”), and he does a reasonably competent job of sustaining the mood of buoyant anarchy and genial soft-heartedness that a movie like “Wild Target” requires. But that mood itself is the problem.

The mixture of zaniness and brutality that is the film’s only point seems, well, pointless. And if “Wild Target” feels a bit second-hand, that may be because it is the dutiful remake of a French crime comedy, “Cible Émouvante” from 1993, that was not all that much fresher back then. Maynard — no one uses his first name — is thrown for a loop by Rose (Ms. Blunt), a thief and grifter whose blithe amateurism both infuriates and disarms him.

After she pulls off a scam involving the theft and forgery of a Rembrandt painting, one of the wronged parties (not the National Gallery, but rather a sensitive gangster played by Rupert Everett) hires Maynard to do her in. Things become complicated when he stumbles on some competition (Gregor Fisher), on an innocent bystander named Tony (Rupert Grint of the “Harry Potter” movies) and on his own tender, protective impulses toward Rose.

How far he will give in to those feelings, and whether she will return them, is the main point of dramatic interest, and Ms. Blunt and Mr. Nighy are nimble enough dancers to carry off this romantic-comedy pas de deux across the narrow boundary between love and hate. But too many other parties insist on cutting in, among them Maynard’s mother (Eileen Atkins) and a rival hit man (Martin Freeman) eager for a chance to become Britain’s next top killer.