Review of The Assignment (2016) by Allan C — 06 Oct 2017

Outrageous and wildly un-PC story has hitman Frank Kitchen, a bearded Michelle Rodriguez, kidnapped and forcibly given gender reassignment surgery by doctor Sigourney Weaker as revenge for Kitchen's killing of her mobster brother.

Kitchen wakes up from the surgery to find himself now a woman, but Kitchen is now determined to find out who did this to him so he/she can exact his/her revenge. From there, the film is a fairly standard revenge picture along the lines of "Point Blank" or "Oldboy" where Kitchen works his way up the food chain of underworld figures until he reaches his eventual final target.

Anthony LaPaglia, who I don't think I've seen in years and was quite excited to see in something again, plays one of those targets who double crossed Kitchen. Tony Shalhoub also has a juicy role as an interrogator taking a statement from Weaver in a Death and the Maiden-like verbal sparing match, where Weaver narrates the events of the film and serves as film's framing device.

Produced, written, directed by Walter Hill, he brings an assured hand to the action and fills the script with his usual tough clipped dialogue. I was about to write that this is Hill's best work in years, but it's really just Hill's first film as director in many years.

Hopefully he's been living comfortably off of his producer credits on all of the Alien sequels and prequels, but it's exciting to see Hill return to his scrappy low-budget action film roots with this outlandish action flick.

"The Assignment" also boasts a score by the great Giorgio Moroder (with orchestrations by and some additional music by Raney Shockne), which is Moroder's first feature film score since the 1990s.

Now if you were wondering if the film has a subtext around gender politics, violence again women, and such, it does not. Hill's film is less like The Wachowski's rich genre and gender mixing "Bound" and is more similar to Steven Soderbergh's "Haywire," which was more just a straight-up action film focused on Gina Carano kicking ass (but with a bit more pulpy Roger Corman/Samuel Z.

Arkoff exploitation thrown in for good measure). Overall, "The Assignment" is a must see for fans of Hill and 1970s style of gritty pulpy action films.