The Couchpotatoes
Because I saw the high rating on here I gave this movie a shot. Normally I'm not very keen on older movies because most of the time they don't age well. The Hit is certainly not an exception on this rule, on the contrary, I don't think I even would have liked it in 1984. I thought it would be interesting to see a younger Tim Roth, that I do like now, but his beginning career was not a great start. Even John Hurt didn't impress me. The acting is all quite mediocre. Maybe it's due to the story but you can't just blame it on that. The extras are sometimes also really bad. I'm disappointed in this movie. It's clearly highly overrated.
vostf
I am quite surprised people tend to overrate The Hit and say it is truly a great little-known movie. Among little known movies it certainly has great qualities, but on the whole it is pretty average.I guess it depends whether you are touched deeper by what is great and then blissfully skip the lesser stuff. This is a fantastic cast indeed. Terence Stamp, Tim Roth and John Hurt do make the show. And the Spanish girl helps too. As usual you may say there are no good actors without a good director. Well no, very good actors can shine in a very average movie and that is exactly the point here. Not that Stephen Frears is a mediocre director - which he proved later - but his work here is hardly adequate.Basically this is a noir film: Past catching up on a guy who did Wrong. There is a fine contrast with shining Spain, the wonderful locations and cinematography, but the script is really not tense. The story runs more like a not too serious fable about Life and Death. The main character appears to have a very philosophical stance on life, while the Spanish gang and Roth's character are on the dumb and clumsy side.I am never too impressed by stone-faced characters. They simply are not interesting, visually and in terms of action. I really think they are the brainchildren of over-indulging authors. John Hurt is great, but frankly his cold-blooded hit-man character is not really convincing. He is not so cold-blooded after all? He has some kind of a slow Epiphany? He just forgets to be the uptight professional he used to? The ending is really not satisfactory. The Hit spent like 1h20 making us appreciate every single character as a human being and then it tips the house of cards. Actually every one is discarded, except the Spanish actors (the girl and Fernando Rey doing little more than multiple cameos) who played the least developed characters.
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).
