There's a cork that holds the movie in place. A cork that reads existential crime thriller, oscillating with some conviction in the dusty scorched space between the road movie and the modern western, not between alternate extremes but with a steady uninterrupted rhythm flipping the same coin again and again; one time it gives us the claustrophobic but humdrum and worn-out dynamics and shifting relationships between kidnappers and kidnapped confined in a car on a road trip through the Spanish countryside to someone's death, tails give us brooding silences and Paco de Lucia's deguello guitar serenading over vast open expanses of arid landscape, they give us sunsets over open horizons and rents of dust kicked up in a dirt road. John Hurt's Mr. Braddock is the enigmatic hit-man of few words and no identity, Tim Roth is his overexcited grimacing sidekick, and Terence Stamp is the calm fatalist resigned to the idea of dying escorted by them to a death in Paris. He plays the middle against the end in ordinary for this type of setup cat and mouse games. Death and how we face him is Stephen Frears' main theme though. The transformations the characters undergo in the face of it speak louder than Terence Stamp's abstract diversions: how we're there one moment, gone the next, and what's the difference, why should we be afraid? Only the woman (the voluptuous and sexy Laura del Sol) is strong enough to survive, because she's the one who's really afraid to die, motivated to fight for life because she's not ready to give up yet. This reminds me of the Father in Cormac McCarthy's The Road: how he has learned to wake himself up from idle beautiful dreams because they lull the mind, because they're a sign of the mind giving up on the real world. It can be a very ugly place the real world and it's only natural to be afraid, at least you know you're still alive.
Despite whatever existential meat and bones there is, the movie is mostly a mood piece though and it's captivating as such. But take the cork out and it starts to disintegrate back to the parts it was made of, back to seedy gas stations in the middle of nowhere, open arid landscapes, and orange suns blazing down on patches of empty asphalt, sand and dust kicked up to muddle the boundaries separating it from all the other movies of the same kind, a little above and below and across the Mexican border, so that they become engulfed back into that curious sifting mass made up of lonesome structures with the paint peeling off under the hot sun and beat-up cars driving up empty roads across empty landscapes that you can pinpoint to a general type of film rather than any particular movie. Back into that antediluvian genre memory of the existential modern western from which now and again a movie by Walter Hill or Sam Peckinpah or the Coen Brothers will stand out to be counted. There's not enough to put The Hit on the same level as No Country for Old Men or Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, but fans of that type of sombre contemplative gritnic cinema will dig it. It's good.
Despite whatever existential meat and bones there is, the movie is mostly a mood piece though and it's captivating as such. But take the cork out and it starts to disintegrate back to the parts it was made of, back to seedy gas stations in the middle of nowhere, open arid landscapes, and orange suns blazing down on patches of empty asphalt, sand and dust kicked up to muddle the boundaries separating it from all the other movies of the same kind, a little above and below and across the Mexican border, so that they become engulfed back into that curious sifting mass made up of lonesome structures with the paint peeling off under the hot sun and beat-up cars driving up empty roads across empty landscapes that you can pinpoint to a general type of film rather than any particular movie. Back into that antediluvian genre memory of the existential modern western from which now and again a movie by Walter Hill or Sam Peckinpah or the Coen Brothers will stand out to be counted. There's not enough to put The Hit on the same level as No Country for Old Men or Bring Me The Head of Alfredo Garcia, but fans of that type of sombre contemplative gritnic cinema will dig it. It's good.