The assignment 2017
IMDB Rating 4.5/10 (as on 01.04.2017)
Following an ace assassin who is double crossed by gangsters
and falls into the hands of rogue surgeon known as The Doctor who turns him
into a woman. The hitman now a hitwoman sets out for revenge, aided by a nurse
named Johnnie who also has secrets.
Director: Walter Hill
Writers: Denis Hamill (screenplay), Denis Hamill (story)
Stars: Michelle Rodriguez, Sigourney Weaver, Caitlin Gerard
|
R | 1h 35min | Action, Crime, Thriller
Seeking Revenge for ‘The Assignment’ She Didn’t Want
Walter Hill is a smart veteran
genre filmmaker (“48 Hrs.,” “Southern Comfort,”
“Last Man Standing”) who’s never been above a little lurid sensationalism. But
using forced gender-reassignment surgery as a major plot hinge for his latest
movie, “The Assignment,” is arguably a miscalculated provocation.
“The Assignment” is not overtly transphobic,
as such, though I’d stand down to anyone calling it insensitive. (It’s been
criticized by Glaad and other gay, bisexual and transgender groups.) But
male-gaze presumptuousness is only its most immediate glaring problem. The
tricksy structure doesn’t have much of a payoff (even though Mr. Hill
constructs sequences with deft fluidity). And the role of the surgically
altered assassin defeats poor Ms. Rodriguez. Utterly recognizable behind a fake
beard during her scenes as a man, she signals her post-surgery confoundedness
by making like Marlon Brando in “The Wild One” or “On the Waterfront.”
(Sigourney Weaver has a better, easier time of it as the haughty surgeon.)
Because Mr. Hill is still, in
most respects, Mr. Hill, a lot of the movie is more watchable than it has a
right to be. But ultimately, “The Assignment” ends up being ridiculous even by
its own nonsensical standards.
Read full review at New York times
In The Assignment, Michelle Rodriguez Is a Hitman Caught
Between Worlds
Stephanie Zacharek
Writer-producer-director and
pulp maestro Walter Hill has been rattling cages and delivering quality thrills
since the early 1970s. He made his directorial debut with Hard Times
(1975), a scrappy, bruising drama starring Charles
Bronson as a Depression-era bare-knuckles boxer. He’s also the guy behind the
New York City street-gang extravaganza The Warriors (1979), the
stolen-gold nail biter Trespass (1992) and The
Driver (1978), with Ryan O’Neal, the ruminative getaway drama
that helped inspire Edgar Wright’s upcoming car-chase musical Baby Driver.
Hill has influenced plenty of
filmmakers—not just Wright, but also Michael Mann and Quentin Tarantino, to
name just a few—though he hasn’t been particularly prolific as a director in
recent years. His new film, The Assignment, isn’t likely to win him any new
friends: Michelle Rodriguez stars as killer-for-hire Frank Kitchen, whose life
is upended when he’s captured and knocked out by a gang of baddies, only to
wake up wrapped in bandages—and a woman. The surgeon genius behind this
transformation is steely-cool Dr. Rachel Kay (Sigourney Weaver), a
straitjacketed jailbird who tells her own story to an earnest prison shrink
played by Tony Shalhoub. Between Dr. Kay’s calculating testimony and and
Frank’s sometimes anguished first-person account, delivered in voice-over, we
piece together exactly what happened to Frank and how he/she went about
wreaking revenge.
Not all of Hill’s movies are
great, and The Assignment certainly isn’t. Maybe, in the strictest terms, it
isn’t even any good. But even a mediocre Walter Hill film has more style and
energy—and a finer sense of the sweet spot between joy and despair—than ninety
percent of the action thrillers that get made today. Considering its
over-the-top plot mechanics, The Assignment isn’t quite as nutso and passionate
as it ought to be. Even the violence, gritty at times, feels a little
impersonal and detached. But the film’s tawdry precision is compelling by
itself.
The ideas behind The Assignment are more complex
than they might seem on the surface. Many of them are also pure Walter Hill:
The script was written by journalist, novelist and screenwriter Denis Hamill
more than 30 years ago, and it borrows pulp elements of
previous Hill films like Johnny Handsome (1989), in
which Mickey Rourke plays a deformed gangster whose face is transformed by
plastic surgery.In Hill’s movies, men make mistakes right and left, and suffer
for them. In The Assignment, Frank doesn’t choose to become a woman, and he
desperately wants not to be one. But what if his enforced rebirth represents a
second chance, a chance to be better? That’s one of the ideas The Assignment,
in its sometimes awkward way, flirts with. It also crawls through the dust
toward another cruel reality: Maybe it takes a woman who used to be a man to
understand just how much of a man’s world this really is.
Read full review at Time
For longtime fans of the
filmmaker, this Canadian-made low-budget revenge yarn will be embraced as
Hill’s most entertaining and, on the terms it sets for itself, accomplished
film in some time. It’s an instant cult item.
In a public climate arguably
more saturated with discussions of gender than ever in the history of the
world, Hill and his co-screenwriter Denis Hamill make subversive creative use
of the topic in ways that are both brainy and amusingly provocative. The catalyst
for all the mayhem is genius, but now defrocked plastic surgeon Dr. Rachel Kay
(Sigourney Weaver in intimidatingly imposing mode), whose revenge upon low-life
hitman Frank Kitchen, who took out her brother, is to capture him and apply her
expertise by turning him into a woman (Michelle Rodriguez); in a world where
transgenderism is now an accepted fact of life, this is one example where it is
neither voluntary nor desired.
Hill, production designer Renee
Read and cinematographer James Liston immediately establish and then maintain
the look of a seedy urban world defined by dirty browns and blacks, as well as
by dimly lit streets, a lonely diner and a seedy old hotel; this is as noir as
it gets these days. On numerous occasions, sequences end with visual
punctuation courtesy of graphic comics-style illustrations.
The somber tone and low-end
production values may not be exactly in tune with young neo-noir enthusiasts,
but more seasoned fans of the genre and the filmmaker will recognize and
embrace Hill’s use of noir to play with and comment on topical issues in a
deliciously subversive way, political correctness be damned. At the same time,
however, a witty intellectual loftiness hovers over everything thanks to the
erudite remarks ceaselessly pouring from the mouth of Weaver’s doctor, who
likes to confound her interrogator with frequent references to
Shakespeare.
Weaver’s terrifically
articulated performance neatly establishes the top side of the film’s high/low
dynamic. For her part of the equation, Rodriguez, with momentary exceptions,
maintains a virulent charge of fury, anger and disgust with what’s been done to
him/her, something that quite plausibly drives the vengeful mission. It’s a
story of two killers, one of whom operates from the brain, the other from more
basic instincts, and together they’re quite a pair for one movie.
Read full review at Hollywood Reporter
Gender-switching hitman
thriller is staggering misfire
Benjamin Lee
There are many thoughts that
run through one’s head while watching a film for the first time. What will
happen next? Is the twist that he’s really dead? Why am I so alone? But the
most fascinating, and perhaps ultimately frustrating, process begins by asking:
what the hell were they thinking?
When films are not just bad but
incompetent, incoherent and incomprehensible, you start to wonder whether an
actual human being was in charge or if a group of monkeys was given free rein
on a soundstage for a month and this is what they produced. Such is the case
with Assignment a B-movie in which the b stands for bad, a film made with such
staggering idiocy that it deserves to be studied by future generations for just
how and why it ever got made.
The premise, which has already
caused upset within the trans community, has hitman Frank Kitchen (played by a
beardy Michelle Rodriguez) kill a drugged up art collector who happens to be
the brother of experimental black market surgeon Dr Rachel Kay (Sigourney
Weaver). As an act of revenge, but also to explore issues of gender and
identity (no really), the unhinged doctor kidnaps Frank and performs
reassignment surgery on him. Frank wakes up as a woman (played by a non-beardy
Michelle Rodriguez), eager for vengeance.
One of the many astonishing
things about the film is that it’s directed by Walter Hill, a man who early in
his career made The Warriors and the underrated Ryan O’Neal thriller The
Driver. It would be understandable, given his vast experience, to expect a base
level of craftsmanship from Hill and that maybe he’d turn this inherently silly
set-up into an outrageous guilty pleasure. But this is a film from a man with
his eye off the road, hand off the wheel but foot on the pedal, a jumble of
shoddy choices and nonsensical dialogue careering wildly into a pit of infamy.
It’s as if Tommy Wiseau decided to remake The Skin I Live In.
Every single decision made by
Hill is bad. Whenever a scene begins (usually via a random iMovie-level transition)
the entire, and I mean entire, address, comes up on screen for no apparent
reason.
Rodriguez, who’s been denied a
lead role for some time now, tries her best to make the dual roles believable
but she’s hampered by sheer incredulity while Weaver spends the film chewing
scenery and probably wondering which life decisions led her here (depressingly,
the first time she worked with Hill was on Alien, a film that he produced).
Tone-deaf in every possible way and made with such haphazard indolence that it
feels as if it might have been made for an ambitious dare, Assignment is a
sewage-stained gift for bad movie fans.
Read full review at Guardian
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