Hitman (1998)

May 24, 2000

by Nathan Shumate

Produced, written and directed by Roberto Roarke
Starring
- Dan O’Meara
- Phil Novak
- Todd Edwards

Part of the problem with judging movies is divorcing them from their context. It’s impossible, really, to judge Albert Pyun and John Carpenter on a level playing field, and the result is that you appreciate a better-than-average Pyun film more than a disappointing Carpenter film, even though the latter may be a better movie by any objective standards. It gets even harder when reviewing anything shot-on-video, since you’re automatically not holding it to the standards of a James Cameron epic; any time the video rises above the level of a punk teenager with his parents’ camcorder, the instinct is to be elated.

Which is why I have such a hard time knowing whether or not I like films I’ve gotten from B-Movie Theater/Sub Rosa Studios. My two previous encounters with them were Kevin Lindenmuth’s hit-and-miss Alien Agenda: Under the Skin (admittedly not an official Sub Rosa release, but sold through them and of the same tenor), and the hideous travesty of all that is holy about cinema, Bad Magic. Both were shot on video, with pity-inspiring budgets. That, then, was my context when watching Hitman.

And by those standards, this movie succeeds admirably. I’m just having a hard time deciding if it does so well by the standards of Movies At Large.

First, our little prologue, with two guys with guns running around what looks like a Sam’s Club-type warehouse store: Our protagonist Lucky with an automatic, and a Japanese guy with an Uzi. Lucky wins, but I won’t go into that here, because this same scene shows up again later.

The movie proper: We open in a bar, hearing the life-story monologue of “BMF” (the meaning of which will shortly become apparent), explaining about his crummy ghetto childhood, his jail term, and the marketing empire he accidentally started when he spent his last twenty cents on a crayon and wrote “Bad M*F*” on a T-shirt. Now Bad M*F* Inc. is a huge conglomerate, which means that BMF is really rich and knows it — and always gets his way.

The recipient of this background is Lucky, an up-and-coming prizefighter, and the point of it all is that BMF wants Lucky to throw his next fight.

He doesn’t.

After the fight, he goes to see his on-again, of-again girlfriend, but it turns out his timing is off — she’s just gotten out of the shower with a slimy sleazebucket who makes a big deal out of their “relationship”, and also manages to kick Lucky’s ass (apparently Lucky’s too used to fighting by the rules). And just when he’s picking himself up from that fight, BMF’s goons haul him in, introducing us to BMF’s main goon, a French bastard (I never did catch his name, so call him Frenchie). BMF gives him an ultimatum: Die right now, or do a hit for BMF. Reluctantly, Lucky takes the second option.

BMF arranges for Lucky to meet with Harvey, a slick hitman with a thing against Nutrasweet. (More on this later.) Harvey gives him a gun and feeds him the 2-Minute Hitman Course, with quotes from The Art of War or Macchiavelli’s The Prince or one of those other philosophical books that hitmen are always quoting in movies.

And then Lucky’s off to the races, rubbing out a Yakuza leader who’s horning in on BMF’s territory. Which brings us back to where we came in: Lucky and the Japanese guy running around the warehouse store. And since we’re shown this scene twice, I feel justified in pointing out everything that annoyed me about it:

It’s the middle of the day, but the store is deserted, except for one ill-fated stocker.
The Japanese guy has an UZI. He fires apparently one round (into the stocker), and then changes his clip, giving Lucky a contrived occasion to tackle him.
The entire scene has been video processed into what amounts to a strobe-like succession of stills, going through at a rate of, what, four per second? This may have seemed like a novel idea, but having to sit through this scene like this — twice — strained my patience. (It is, by the way, the only scene shown in this format. Thank heavens.)

But after that, the BMF’s goons (notably Frenchie) double-cross him, intending to rub him out. After escaping from them, having nowhere else to go, he runs back to Harvey…

It’s very apparent that Hitman is head-and-shoulders above some other Sub Rosa releases in terms of technical quality. For one thing, it was shot on film. That’s right, film. And not only that, but it was shot with a fair amount of flair, using the camera as more than just a stationary spectator. Kudos to director Ricardo Roarke for actually using a camera like it’s meant to be used.

And he certainly works around his low budget, at least in terms of location. The main locations are the bar and the warehouse store, and each time the camera is used in such a way to make sure you know that you’re dealing with different spaces here; this is not one of those micro-budget movies in which everything was shot in all the director’s friends’ suburban shoeboxes.

It’s also very apparent that Roarke loves Quentin Tarantino. Devotedly. The script is chock full of long meaningless dialogue sequences, meant to imitate Tarantino’s off-topic digressions. Unfortunately, most of these actually turn out as monologues, delivered at such a fast pace that they seem very much to be the memorized speeches they are. There’s BMF’s opening monologue (and let me say here that the actor playing BMF is way too genteel to be an ex-con running such unsavory grafts). There’s Harvey in bed with his girlfriend Consuela, complaining that her constant exclamations of “Oh Jesus, oh Mary Mother of God” sap his passion (actually a pretty funny little bit). There’s Harvey’s monologue to Lucky on having a sweet tooth and how Nutrasweet’s gonna kill you. Etc. By the time we get Frenchie’s big diatribe to Lucky about how the French have cool culture and ugly Americans only have baseball and hamburger, my response to the screen was, “Yeah, then why does the Burger Royale sell so well, you French ass?” It’s all a bit too much hero worship, and none of these episodes are pulled off nearly so well as the similar scenes in Pulp Fiction.

And there are technical problems detracting, mostly related to sound; the looped scenes are terribly obviousl and the foley work is patchy and intermittent.

In the end, though, the story is what falls down. In Pulp Fiction, the dialogues and monologues are used to reveal the characters that matter, especially Samuel L. Jackson’s character. Here, Lucky is very distinctly the main character, yet he barely says anything; it’s everyone else who’s spouting dialogue, yet ultimately they go through no changes.

I’m still trying to decide whether I liked Hitman, on an objective scale. In the end, I’d have to say it comes off as a promising student project. But on the other hand, I really feel that I wouldn’t enjoy watching it again, and that probably answers my question right there.