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The Hit List
A hit man's boss refers him to a client, a dangerous woman who mixes business with pleasure.
Release : | 1993 |
Rating : | 5.3 |
Studio : | Vision International, Westwind, |
Crew : | Art Direction, Production Design, |
Cast : | Jeff Fahey Yancy Butler James Coburn Michael Beach Randy Oglesby |
Genre : | Action Thriller |
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Rating: 6.9
Reviews
Touches You
How sad is this?
Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.
what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.
Fahey is good here actually...the story's ok enough, its got all the classic ingredients of a solid film noir--its got a potential femme fatale, its got a decent enough boss character played by a great veteran actor (in this case James Coburn), its got a hero who is talked into murdering a guy who's giving a woman a lot of trouble....I just 100% described "Double Indemnity" which this movie is nowhere near the quality of...but for once its not the screenplay's fault so much as it is the pacing of the film...it is sloooow moving from plot point to plot point. Slow and rather somber too. A movie like this, i'm not asking for it to be funny but a couple of wry tossed off one liners here or there would've been very effective. Instead we get a lot of Fahey grimacing over him violating his own code. (Hmmm an assassin with his own moral code...where have i seen that before???) That said, its not terrible, if you stumble across it as I did, its worth a look if only for Fahey's very solid performance. (Coburn is good in his handful of scenes too, but unfortunately he's not really given much to do beyond look concerned and issue some ominous warnings about Fahey getting too close) Again its not a terrible movie, but its just too slowly paced for its own good. (I did like the jazz score to it tho, those opening credits are very engaging and seem to promise a better movie largely due to that score)
Think of a cliché, any cliché, in a movie about a professional hit men getting tangled in a web of revenge. Thought about one? It's in this movie.The leading star Jeff Fahey plays the pro-hit-man and as you could've guessed, he's the sexy, strong silent type hit-man who hardly speaks more then 3 sentences in a conversation. ("I only kill people who deserve to die...") There are flashbacks when someone looks at a picture, there is a client falling in love with the hit-men, etc. etc. etc. The conversations in the movie are the stereotype dialogues you expect in a b-movie and the police-officers investigating the murders just seem to be working on their first case ever.I give it a 4, for there are martial arts movies about revenge that are worse then this, but this movie comes close...
Charlie Pike is an ex-Government agent turned contract killer. He kills on behalf of lawyer Peter Mahew who is part of a committee of lawyers who hand out their own version of justice. Pike takes a job from Mahew to help out a family friend, the beautiful Jordan. However when Pike completes the contract he falls for Jordan, a situation that leads him into a double crossing situation where deception leads to murder.When the wonderfully creative people in the TVM business sit down to really push the envelope on a project they really go for it. Imagine the planning meeting for this! `hey, lets make a thriller about a hitman who is ruthless, but really a good guy who is sensitive and listens to classical music', `yeah and lets have him be kind but tough and trying to get out of the business except this one last job'. After that how else can they make it really stand out well lets shoot it all in blues and shadow of TVM noir and have the usual jazz soundtrack to add `atmosphere' and `mood'.Nothing in the plot or film really manages to be different from any other TVM you'd see and it fails to engage simply for this reason. On top of the cliché ridden film we have an obvious bit of casting with Fahey and Butler (neither strangers to this tvm stuff). The only surprise was Coburn who I imagine has let stuff like this slip off his CV since he got his Oscar.Overall this is so very predictable and clichéd that it really fails to inspire even a little bit of interest. We have every staple of the thriller/noir TVM soft porn, jazz music, unimaginative direction it's all here. It's not a bad film, just a very flat one that has all the appeal of a mass produced industrial production when compared to something clever or inspired.
Like I said, this is quite a trashy movie. I didn't realize that it had been on TV until I checked this web site recently. Anyway, I saw the movie on video; so I'm sure that it was edited severely before it hit TV. There is a topless breast shot in the first ten seconds. As far as what that says for the rest of the movie, do your own math. Even though I am a huge fan of Yancy Butler, this movie just didn't do it for me. And that's saying something because I'm an open minded person who's willing to give anything a chance. (See my comments on the police action thriller "Jailbait".) There is a funny scene where Jeff Fahey and Yancy Butler are making out, and her hair gets in his mouth. (As you can tell, I find just about anything humorous.) Now that James Coburn has won an Oscar, he is probably trying to erase all connections between himself and this movie.