Rating: 
Summary: Deserves to be a small cult
Review: "The Hit" is a wonderful and endearing early effort from top Brit director Frears. A slick kidnap, road movie with a kooky edge, blending in beautious spanish landscapes with theories on mortality and teenage crushes. But its the charming, oddball characters that really sell this. Terance Stamp is perfect as the doomed, yet gleeful Willy, and is able to be sympathetic, enigmatic and wickedly comic. John Hurt is brutal and troubled as the Hitman who develops a quite surreal relationship with his female hostage. However the most winning performance here belongs to a remarkably young Tim Roth as the lippy sidekick. His portrayal of Myron is spunky, goonie and...adorable! This is the sort of movie you watch at 2:ooam and it gains a kind of dreamlike quality. The ending is so painfully ironic.
Rating:
Summary: Deserves to be a small cult
Review: "The Hit" is a wonderful and endearing early effort from top Brit director Frears. A slick kidnap, road movie with a kooky edge, blending in beautious spanish landscapes with theories on mortality and teenage crushes. But its the charming, oddball characters that really sell this. Terance Stamp is perfect as the doomed, yet gleeful Willy, and is able to be sympathetic, enigmatic and wickedly comic. John Hurt is brutal and troubled as the Hitman who develops a quite surreal relationship with his female hostage. However the most winning performance here belongs to a remarkably young Tim Roth as the lippy sidekick. His portrayal of Myron is spunky, goonie and...adorable! This is the sort of movie you watch at 2:ooam and it gains a kind of dreamlike quality. The ending is so painfully ironic.
Rating: 
Summary: Technical review only!
Review: A forerunner to "Sexy Beast", the outstanding 1984 Brit-Noir "The Hit" is a lushly filmed, "*****" (five-star) movie by director Stephen Frears ("My Beautiful Laundrette","High Fidelity", "Dirty Pretty Things"). It features a dream cast (Terrence Stamp, John Hurt and the big screen dubut of Tim Roth). A five-star film, a critically acclaimed director/cast, and a beautifully-filmed Mediterranean locale. Any one of the aforementioned attributes should warrant respectful treatment of the film's transfer to DVD. Unfortunately, Artisan "Entertainment" botches the job once again (check out customer reviews of Artisan's DVD release of "The Last Emperor" to see the pattern emerging here). Not only is the DVD in "pan & scan", but the print is quite dark and noticably "jittery" in several places. The audio, while acceptable, exhibited no improvement over the the s-vhs copy I had already archived from a cable airing. I understand that "The Hit" is likely destined to "cult" status, with a limited arthouse audience, but does this justify the shoddy, inattentive treatment? Scour your cable listings until Criterion gets hold of it.
Rating:
Summary: The Passenger
Review: Any quick synopsis of the plot may give you the idea that this is like so many independent films that came after it but its not. The three things that make this different and better are the three actors involved. The young hood who acts tough but really may not have the stomach for this kind of thing is Tim Roth, the true professional hit man who has little patience for his young accomplice and would be apprentice is John Hurt. And the target for the elaborate hit is the always exquisite Terence Stamp who knows it has been coming all the years and has become very philosophical, almost welcoming it when it finally appears. Stamp too was a pro and that makes both Hurt and Roth admire him, even revere him perhaps for accepting things like he does. There is action but most of it is character interaction, which is very good. Visually the most exciting scenes are in Spain where Stamp has been hiding it out in a very comfortable country villa, but the trip back to Paris presents several interesting villages and vistas. Frears later did Dangerous Liasons which I also like but this smaller film is my favorite of his primarily because of the Stamp character and Terence Stamp himself. If you've seen anything of his from Billy Budd to Fellinis Toby Dammit to Pasolinis Theorem to The Limey, you know he is one of the most interesting screen presences you will ever encounter, The Hit was made when he hadn't been seen in a picture for a while so the fact that the character he plays in The Hit has also been out of circulation for awhile gives the role an added dimension.
Later Reservoir Dogs made Tim Roth famous and for good reason but here you get his debut doing it all for the first time. And Hurt is always scary as hell like he's haunted with some knowledge about human nature that you nor I nor anyone will ever know about.
Rating:
Summary: Leave it to Artisan...
Review: Artisan is the worst!Having never seen this film, I was extremely excited to see that it was to be released on DVD finally...until I noticed that Artisan was going to release it. Sure enough, Artisan has done it again, offering The Hit in a pan & scan format. Surely this is not an action cheapie, and as such deserves better treatment than Artisan is putting out. If you don't care about format, ignore my review. If you do care, I suggest that you be careful buying any Artisan DVDs, as they are releasing loads of P & S titles these days. Would someone in authority please advise Artisan to raise their price point and release these films in a double-sided disc offering both formats, a la Warner Brothers?
Rating:
Summary: DVD available Pan & Scan only
Review: I've been waiting for this film to come out on DVD for years. I like it quite a bit -- it's sort of a philisophical gangster road movie. I'd normally rate it maybe 3 1/2 stars. But I can't give that rating to this version of it, unfortunately, since I discovered when I tried to watch it tonight that it's Pan & Scan -- cutting off both sides of the picture -- and apparently that's the only way that Artisan will to release it. Don't you hate it when film studios don't actually care about their films? Anyway, if you don't mind Pan & Scan, by all means, check this one out. Heck, I'll sell you mine, cheap.
Rating:
Summary: DVD available Pan & Scan only
Review: I've been waiting for this film to come out on DVD for years. I like it quite a bit -- it's sort of a philisophical gangster road movie. I'd normally rate it maybe 3 1/2 stars. But I can't give that rating to this version of it, unfortunately, since I discovered when I tried to watch it tonight that it's Pan & Scan -- cutting off both sides of the picture -- and apparently that's the only way that Artisan will to release it. Don't you hate it when film studios don't actually care about their films? Anyway, if you don't mind Pan & Scan, by all means, check this one out. Heck, I'll sell you mine, cheap.
Rating: 
Summary: Three brilliant actors have the time of their film lives.
Review: Imagine dark, claustrophobic films noirs 'The Killers' and 'The Third Man', shot in the bright desert spaces of sunny Spain. Terence Stamp is a gangster-turned-grass who has spent ten years hiding in a quiet Spanish village, methodically educating himself. One day he is kidnapped by a gang of juvenile delinquents working for two hitmen, ominously taciturn John Hurt and his volatile young protege Tim Roth. So begins a bizarre road movie in which all the usual film noir rules are tragicomically tweaked. 'The Hit' resembles 'The Killers' in the story of two assassins baffled by the calm resignation of their target (this is the opening situation of the film; I am not revealing anything). Stamp is a comic joy, relaxed, amused and watchful, completely unnerving two thugs who had expected a gibbering coward. 'The Hit' has been called an Absurdist thriller, with Stamp as an existential Everyman; the silent police are perhaps the implacable agents of Fate rendering futile human endeavour. But this is to miss the 'Third Man' element, the great gusts of comedy that deflates the 'philosophy': the jaunty jangle of Spanish guitar; the delicious interplay between amazing actors, whose mixture of menace and ordinary blokishness anticipates Tarantino; the giddy shifts in tone; Frears' taste for mischievous, distorted, wide-angled compositions. The opening court-room scene, when the convicted prisoners jeer a murderous 'We'll Meet Again' at a startled Stamp, is worth the movie alone. There are even Graham Greene-like allusions to 'Don Quixote' and Spanish picaresque which gives a certain nobility to the Hurt character, a vicious gangster who subtly becomes the film's true hero, embodiment of its more enigmatic moments, such as the extraordinary misty-glade sequence, coming upon a man who should have run away, communing with a mystical realm to which he has no access. This is not to suggest the film is a spoof - the violence when it comes is distressingly real; but it is in this hybrid tension of modes and genres that Frears' best work has always been done, and 'The Hit' is a little classic.
Rating:
Summary: Three brilliant actors have the time of their film lives.
Review: Imagine dark, claustrophobic films noirs 'The Killers' and 'The Third Man', shot in the bright desert spaces of sunny Spain. Terence Stamp is a gangster-turned-grass who has spent ten years hiding in a quiet Spanish village, methodically educating himself. One day he is kidnapped by a gang of juvenile delinquents working for two hitmen, ominously taciturn John Hurt and his volatile young protege Tim Roth. So begins a bizarre road movie in which all the usual film noir rules are tragicomically tweaked. 'The Hit' resembles 'The Killers' in the story of two assassins baffled by the calm resignation of their target (this is the opening situation of the film; I am not revealing anything). Stamp is a comic joy, relaxed, amused and watchful, completely unnerving two thugs who had expected a gibbering coward. 'The Hit' has been called an Absurdist thriller, with Stamp as an existential Everyman; the silent police are perhaps the implacable agents of Fate rendering futile human endeavour. But this is to miss the 'Third Man' element, the great gusts of comedy that deflates the 'philosophy': the jaunty jangle of Spanish guitar; the delicious interplay between amazing actors, whose mixture of menace and ordinary blokishness anticipates Tarantino; the giddy shifts in tone; Frears' taste for mischievous, distorted, wide-angled compositions. The opening court-room scene, when the convicted prisoners jeer a murderous 'We'll Meet Again' at a startled Stamp, is worth the movie alone. There are even Graham Greene-like allusions to 'Don Quixote' and Spanish picaresque which gives a certain nobility to the Hurt character, a vicious gangster who subtly becomes the film's true hero, embodiment of its more enigmatic moments, such as the extraordinary misty-glade sequence, coming upon a man who should have run away, communing with a mystical realm to which he has no access. This is not to suggest the film is a spoof - the violence when it comes is distressingly real; but it is in this hybrid tension of modes and genres that Frears' best work has always been done, and 'The Hit' is a little classic.
Rating:
Summary: John Hurt's finest
Review: John Hurt is the star here, a polished professional hit man without emotions . . . until things start to come apart. Saddled with a smartass punk assistant, Hurt is assigned to hit a stool pidgeon who turns out to be amateur philosopher, facing death with equanamity. As the job goes from bad to worse, turning into a kind of road trip from hell, Hurt resigns himself to a sort of passivity, accepting situations that madden him, relinquishing control of himself in a state of detachment that is troubling to see. You almost want him to kill all these people and regain his deportment, rather than accept one insult after another to his dignity as a professional. Hurt is perfect in the role, and the supporting cast make up an excellent ensemble, of sorts. The hero is doomed of course, but the journey to the end is well worth the trip. Outstanding.
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