Hit List (1989) Directed by William Lustig
You can easily see where the filmmakers intend to take the formulaic pop mechanics of this dysfunctional action crime routine. Once these genre pursuits are identified, William Lustig’s Hit List poses nicely as an independent urban micro-action thriller alternative to Cannon Films’ overblown cheesy macro-action capers. Nevertheless, when you really put its streamlined American B-movie economy into storytelling perspective, you realize that it doesn’t do the trick as well as the flicks it mimics.
A hard-boiled Lance Henriksen plays an assassin hired by the garrulous mob boss Vic Luca (Rip Torn) to eliminate all the witnesses testifying against him so that he can be acquitted in court. But a simple random mistake leads the cold-hearted hitman in the wrong direction, assaulting the wrong woman, murdering the wrong man and kidnapping the wrong child. Jan-Michael Vincent plays the child’s father and ultimately the cool avenger we root for. It sounds like a cacophonous echo of Death Wish meets Night of the Juggler. But it’s not even remotely close to being those pulpy violent NYC escapades. The realism of the cheap cinematography set in Los Angeles exudes excitement, yet it is only a geographic excitement, not one of character or narrative. Lustig delivers intensity through this urban dynamism, but the actors never fit into this dynamic, rather they seem lost and standoffish. The flabbiness of the main plot’s attempt at pathos exposes a film too haphazard to settle its structural concerns – the first act doubles as a great suspenseful crime set piece, the middle act as a character set-up, and the third act as a subplot, all of which should have been the other way around.
Henriksen is competent as the unstoppable killer freak and Rip Torn hamming it up whenever he gets the chance is fittingly camp, and Bill Lustig’s directing is as per usual crude, hard-edged filmmaking but serves its purpose. The problem is that this isn’t economically advantageous filmmaking for this style of over-the-top action theatrics, it’s more of a parsimonious, inane practice. It’s not effective, though it’s certainly the sort of interesting junk that appeals for its maddening imperfections.