Titreenp SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

ChicRawIdol A brilliant film that helped define a genre

Brendon Jones It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

blanche-2 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.

jzappa 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.

MisterWhiplash The Hit is a movie that is hard to forget, but if you do you'll be happy to remember it. It's the kind of movie that had I seen it in the 1980's, I would still think back fondly to a moment or two, to the strange sense of inner peace that Terence Stamp's character Willie Parker has on this 'road trip' to his death by the hands of gangsters, or the way that John Hurt's Braddock wears his sunglasses, or how the chipper Spanish music accentuates scenes with an unusual flavor. We may have seen movies where a criminal, who went 'rat' on his former criminal buddies, is discovered years later to finally meet his comeuppance, but it's hard to think of another quite like this, one that is directed with such an eye for photographic beauty in the Spanish villas and mountains and deserts, or with the dark comedy of the performances.It's ostensibly just about that, two criminals (Hurt and Tim Roth) taking a guy like Willie Parker back to meet his maker for what he did. But there's more to the tale: they stop off at another mate's flat in Madrid and they take his girl (Laura Del Sol), an innocent, as collateral when they get across the border, and from there it's about what Braddock will or won't do, what Roth's Myron as the young, energetic upstart who could possibly stop Braddock from his path of destruction, and how a weary detective (Fernando Rey, who has not a line of dialog) follows along the trail of violence and bloodshed. It's about this without ever having to push the dialog in explanation too much: only in the last third, when we hear Willie's reasons for being so... comfortable with his position as a kidnapped wanted man, that the screenplay stops to add words.It's fairly dramatic and contemplative on what it is to be a criminal, how to be as you are with a gun pointed at someone or committing violence or acting all like a bad-ass. There's this conflict we see especially between the three characters of Willie, Myron and Braddock, where one is just along for the ride, with some gallows humor so to speak ("I'll just get back in the car then?), one is just fine getting his thousand dollars for his first ever job, but will stop his superior if need be, and the other is quiet and calm, like a refugee from a Jim Jarmusch crime film (coincidentally to the Stranger from Limits of Control Hurt was also in that mystery movie), but is professional to a degree. Frears lets the actors open up the material as he opens up the scope and environments they inhabit: it's not about the standard plot, but about what the characters are about.I may have made The Hit to sound ponderous or pretentious, but it really isn't. It's a very entertaining and surprising ride we take, where conventions are eschewed for that feeling of anything-is-possible on the road. There's some laughs, there's some thrills, and an ending that is not predictable despite it following a formula going all the way back to 1940's film noir. It's an underrated gem from British crime lore that should be seen by anyone on the lookout for something different from the genre, or for something unexpected from the actors (Roth's being his screen debut).

lost-in-limbo Ten years ago Willie Parker testified in court against some of his criminal buddies and ever since then, has been waiting for them to settle the score while hiding out in Spain. Soon enough his tracked down by two hit men, the slick professional Braddock and his raw rookie Myron. Who plan to take him back to Paris to meet up with those he done in, but on their trip there they stop off at a Madrid apartment that includes an unplanned kidnapping of a young Spanish girl, Maggie. Through the trip Parker's pondering manner starts getting on the pairs' nerves and the feisty Maggie makes matters even worse. Nothing is truly going to plan with these constant distractions and the Spanish police are hot on their trail. I wasn't expecting to like "The Hit" as much as I did. But came away really enjoying and thinking highly of this oddity, after knowing nothing about it to begin with. It was neat blind purchase (well, it only cost $2), which really did pay off. This colourfully kooky British crime feature has a premise that likes play mind games by breezily building upon the animated characters and random situations they find themselves stuck in. It's about them finding their feet and coming to terms that death might be around the corner. Nothing to fear in something you shouldn't be afraid off. Peter Prince's tautly fleshed out script has real sensitivity about it and goes down well with the simple road trip storyline. While rather talkative, the dialogue driven outing has a lyrically deeper underbelly, where personalities clash with amusingly engaging and wittily sly results. Action is little, but it doesn't suffer from it and when it unfold, its intensely drawn up. Director Stephen Frears paints a poetically subdued feel to it with such freshly assured and suave direction. He truly sets up some beautiful visions without losing any of that brutal edge when called for (the surprising climax takes the cake). Mick Molloy's fetchingly sublime photography-work incorporates the alluringly picturesque backdrop of Spain with elegant scope. He even frames diverse scenes with inspired shots that have you in awe. Eric Clapton plugs away for the sweepingly airy opening title and Paco de Lucia stirringly upbeat Spanish flavour to the music score kicks up the energy levels and unpredictable vibe. The technical side of the production is pretty top-draw and sufficiently done. The performances are all marvellous in crafting out their characters and feeding off each other with believable chemistry. An outstandingly novel John Hurt plays the professionally cool, tough as nails hit-man Braddock with such cold venom. Character actor Tim Roth (in his film debut) is brilliant in a total opposite persona as a young clueless, hot-wired rookie Myron getting a little too attached to their captivates. Terence Stamp stands-out in his turn of the lively accepting Willie Parker, who throws up some words of wisdom along the way and strangely becomes fixated with his closing destiny. Laura del Sol dashingly fine as the strong willed Maggie who adds the sparks. Also showing up in short, but potent roles is Aussie actor Bill Hunter and Fernando Rey playing an officer closing on their tails. "The Hit" is a focused, well thought-out production that I believe to be perfect across the board. Some people might find it to lead nowhere, but seductively enterprising is what comes to my mind.