The Hit (1985)

Best movie of this year hands down!

I gave it a 7.5 out of 10

Good , But It Is Overrated By Some

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Only things I really liked were the beautiful Spanish vistas, the big Spanish titties and the face on Tim Roth.

I have a feeling most of these rave reviews came from men. I'm not a man.Despite my absolute adoration for the gorgeous Terrence Stamp (who looks fabulous in this film), my respect for the wonderful John Hurt as an actor, and my admiration for Stephen Frears as a director, "The Hit" was not a hit with me.I found this gangster road trip slow and not very interesting. The best scenes for me were in the beginning when Stamp testifies against his cronies and they sing "Someday we'll Meet Again." After that, for this viewer, it was downhill.It felt much longer than one hour and 38 minutes.Lest anyone call me an idiot, I think that everyone is entitled to an opinion, and if you got something out of this film and saw things to enjoy, I think that's great. I wish I had. But everything isn't for everybody, and "The Hit" just wasn't for me.

It was a bizarre crossbreed, London crime drama and Spanish road picture, maybe condemned by its displacement and disdain for genre convention. Hardly any critics at the time grasped the film's intermingling of the hip and the high-minded. Today's critics, comparatively at least, would welcome it in the company of its offspring, like Gangster No. 1, Sexy Beast and In Bruges, and the American counterparts contributed by the Coens and Tarantino. A few films have mythologized British underworld since Michael Caine's glory days. The Hit challenged it in unique ways, reconnecting its rogues into a different legendary backdrop, that of the western, as Braddock and Myron transport Willie along the roads that twist through Spain's parched landscape.The ostensible hero of The Hit is Willie Parker, who, in the beginning, rats out four of his mob mates. Flash-forward a decade, and his unperturbed life in southern Spain terminates with the appearance of underworld executioner Braddock and his rookie associate Myron. They seize Willie and travel towards Paris, where he'll be handed over to the boss of the men he informed on. The film opens with a bristly Eric Clapton solo, signaling a foreshadowing slow-mo shot of a man in an off-white suit sauntering up a hilltop. Paco de Lucía's flamenco soundtrack turns on the dismay throughout. The man, Braddock, faces the awesome vista, but does he see it? This ill-omened image sponges from a later scene when Braddock must make a life-or-death choice. Its return tosses a circle around the tale, bringing the characters to the stage where they must face mortality.The personal dialogue exchanges that bear the rapport between Willie and his dispatchers are interspersed with Braddock and Myron's eruptions of flamboyant viciousness, which bequeath footprints for the police, headed by a dismayed detective played by the excellent Fernando Rey. Braddock's murders are the undertakings of a man demoralized by Willie's sublime calmness. For predator and prey are seemingly upturned in this very humanistic gangster film. Willie incessantly reframing Braddock and Myron's mindsets, as when he interprets Braddock's failure to kill Maggie, the doe-eyed Spanish beauty they've snatched from the Madrid apartment where she stayed with the fearful Australian goon Harry. "It's supposed to be quick, clean work," Willie prods Myron as Braddock crouches on a swathe of badlands. "It was a mistake," Myron rationalizes. "Yeah, but he's not meant to have accidents. Perhaps he's slipping." Willie further condescends them when explaining in epic historical terms to Myron why Spain has so many castles. But in gibing Braddock and Myron, who fade in contrast with Charlemagne's renowned brothers in arms, Willie encourages Myron to ask him why he turned stooge. By smoothly replying that he couldn't confront prison again or decline the prosecutors' deal, he remembers the two-faced Willie seen in court, and checks the pity we may have for him as a Zen desperado who's reconciled himself.If Gal in Sexy Beast is incapable of communicating his existential dilemma, Willie's a philosopher cut from a different cloth than the standard East End thug. Willie's sophistication is despised by others of his sort, and probably also by those who anticipate a more traditional crime film. In a safe house before his court appearance, one of his guards snatches his book. One of the Spanish punks who hijack Willie for Braddock wields a knife at his Escher print.Frears shuns car chases, gunfights, and sex for obscuring the customary functions of captive and captor, lyricizing a story that evolves in immorality, and concentrating on a protagonist who irrevocably disappoints us. In stage-managing the doctrines of the gangster film, the western, the road movie and even film noir, Frears probes their authenticity. And although this narrative amalgam is awash with confrontation, it inhabits the inner life instead of the outside. Willie's and Braddock's wits work overtime, and their unseen battle is more gripping than the periodic murders and the police hunt. This elevates The Hit into a transcendental domain where gunfire has no range.The story's generational divide aids a reconciliation toward the finale. Braddock loses control when he sees Myron catnapping on watch duty, but he finds Willie observing a waterfall. Willie stands facing away from Braddock, who trains his gun, but is too intimidated to squeeze the trigger. The haunted picture of Willie set against the wall of mist hints at the inescapable death of Christ. That night, they talk intimately in the woods, where Braddock doubts Willie's audacity. "We're here," Willie says, "then we're not here. We're somewhere else. It's as natural as breathing. Why should we be scared?" Earlier, Willie puzzles Myron with another speech justifying death as harmless. All this would look like obvious laboriousness, premeditated to put his captors off guard, were it not for Stamp's skillfully hazy performance. The last of Willie's words and movements that we see in the movie are staggering in what they tell about him. Regardless, it's not his honesty we distrust, but his deceit, as his arousal of sympathy in Braddock culminates in a sort of liberation for both.

John Hurt's strongest feature is his voice, full of shading and subtlety yet splendidly articulate with an attractive timbre. So why in HELL would he be cast as a professional killer with maybe twenty-five lines of dialog in the whole picture? What a waste!A very young Tim Roth with a blond dye job looks underfed and downright weird, though he does try for the eager apprentice thing and in places gets it right. The distinguished Spanish actor Fernando Rey has a tiny part, not appearing until the movie is three-quarters over.Ms. del Sol looks attractive though her character--unlike her bosom-- is hardly developed. Terrence Stamp looks better than ever but has little to do in the picture, which lurches from crime drama to travelogue (some nice shots of the countryside of northern Spain) to philosophical exposition, unable to decide what it wants to be. The script writer apparently didn't know how to end the story. By then he must have been told that the movie already was too long. The ending he chose seems tacked on, with heavy borrowing from the Ambrose Bierce short story "Parker Adderson, Philosopher". What's good apart from the beauty of the Basque country are the action sequences near the start and at the very beginning the English courtroom scene.