22nd
The Hit (1984)
The Hit, shot the year I was born (’84), plays fresh, smart and lean. An Eric Clapton opening riff sets the date, as do the Warriors-style graffiti credits, but the rest of the film is free from period vestiges. It’s one of those films where the parts are a little bit more than the whole, but the parts are entertaining enough to excuse the lack of gestalt. The film is a philosophical criminal picture - bad men talking deep - and is saved from self-serious suicide by witty direction and self-sufficient actors. Terence Stamp - wonderful, always, but perpetually miscast - is a world-wise snitch, hiding out in Spain for a decade after ratting out his bosses back in Britain. Two hitmen, John Hurt and Tim Roth, track him down and shepherd him home for payback. Stamp has a good face, and his arrogance is endlessly charming, but until the film’s final ten minutes his character is useless and forgettable. ”You die when you gotta die,” his Willie Parker intones, and his fatalism is so perfect, so calm and infuriating, you can’t take him seriously as anything but a movie concoction. Hurt and Roth, as the less certain, more human mobsters, buoy the film and save it from Parker’s stoic dead weight. Hurt, as Braddock, is old and slow, with a bemused morality creeping in around the edges of his violent deeds. He hesitates over killing a friend that has wandered into his kidnapping scheme, and he brings a coquettish mole (Laura del Sol), also in the wrong place at the wrong time, along for the ride after hearing she is only 15. As Hurt plays him, it’s uncertain whether Braddock is going soft in his old age or just displeased with the messiness of the situation he finds himself in. He’s a man accustomed to a certain level of propriety and his small acts of kindness (sparing the girl, hesitating over his friend’s death) may in fact be instances of disgust – he can’t bring himself to do work that is so untidy, with so many loose ends. Roth, as the young buck out on his first job, is fierce and flashy. He’s like the pit-bull puppy who gets so excited while playing fetch he starts mauling his master’s leg – his enthusiastic moments find natural, perfect expression in violence. Death makes him happy. Death is the big trip – for other people. Well, of course: he’s a kid. He’s never considered the inevitability of endings – real endings – for himself. Roth’s vicious, asocial absurdity has always made him a force on screen. He’s one of those freebie actors who, if you’re lucky enough to cast him, will be entertaining regardless of what’s happening around him. Frears wrangles Roth’s energies to service the character and the film, and ends up drawing out one of the actor’s best, most in-tune performances.
Direction and acting are strong enough, but the script is just a little too tooled. Dialog is sparse and most of the film takes place in silent action, both good things, but the few bits of vocalization that do find their way past screenwriter Peter Prince’s pen are all tip-toed and mannered – the writing is about as naturalized as in an M. Night Shyamalan picture. The actors play their lines cool and low, but with a script this didactic, it’s hard to get past that feeling of being in class, under the glare of a focused lecture on how things are. Harold Pinter did a fair number of these sorts of things back in his day, and The Dumbwaiter, absurdist and half-real, is about as good as it gets. Prince doesn’t push The Hit’s philosophy far enough, isn’t willing to cross totally out of reality and into the land of stage and thought. It hurts the film - the plot, the script - but gives the director an excuse to stage clever, focused scenes in the real world. It makes the film into a show-reel for Frears’ potential. He directed this early in his career, and you get the sense that he’s trying to save the material, working feverishly to keep the audience’s (and his own) attentions from wandering. Fist fights are staged with an eye towards the comedically awkward, and any scene that can be pushed slightly towards absurdity via camera angles is. The direction injects something of the mania, of the insincerity, that is missing from Prince’s script. It’s not Frears’ best film, but it shows his righteous stuff in waiting.
(Something should be said about Laura del Sol’s Maggie. Del Sol is beautiful and when working in Spanish may be an actress, but she’s given nothing of substance here. Maggie is an idiotic creature of surfaces. She is shrill and bestial, useful to the film only in so far as she can provide slinky looks and tears on command. In her most memorable scene, she bites John Hurt on the hand and the two sustain a test of wills – she dares him to pull his hand away, he dares here to bite down harder. The scene comes off bizarre and insulting. Hurt reacts with an emphatic panic, a very human response of “oh hell,” while del Sol glares flatly while growling. The filmmakers probably thought this gave her character spunk, showed how strong she was, but instead you watch her and think of a puppy in need of training. Maggie is a plot device - she gives Hurt an excuse to debate the big M’s of morality and mortality - and the worst part of an otherwise inoffensive film.)
