The Assignment

Walter Hill – 2017 – USA

Don’t ask me for a recommendation on this one.  I’m one of the three or four people in the world who loved Walter Hill’s last film, Bullet to the Head (2013).  I’m incapable of processing The Assignment in any other context than as part of Hill’s filmography.  If it also happens to be an action film, a psychological thriller or a study of transgender issues, that’s purely incidental.  If those are what you’re after, you’re probably better off looking elsewhere.  If you know and admire Hill’s work, though, you should be intrigued.  His stories are rooted in the same hard-boiled crime dramas from which Quentin Tarantino’s also descend, but he avoids all of Tarantino’s post-modernism and self-referential affects; which doesn’t endear him to critics but which makes his films admirably concise and unpretentious.  The Assignment returns us to the noirish but strangely fantastic urban worlds of past Hill classics like The Driver (1978), Streets of Fire (1984) and Johnny Handsome (1989).  In a surprising and bold performance, Michelle Rodriguez plays a male hitman, Frank Kitchen, who unwittingly murders the brother of a brilliant but unstable plastic surgeon (Sigourney Weaver), and is punished by her with a forced sex-change operation.  Understandably, Frank is pretty steamed when he wakes up in his new body, and vows revenge.  Casual viewers will undoubtedly dwell upon the extent to which Rodriguez’s drag is effective, and in so doing will miss most of what makes the film interesting, such as the more subtle explorations of gender confusion, like Frank’s girlfriend’s nickname of ‘Johnnie’ and Weaver’s mannish wardrobe of business suit and short haircut.  Remarkably – possibly even miraculously – the film somehow steers clear of a social-political debate about the phenomenon of sexual reassignment surgery and gender identity.  I can hardly think of another film that has this as a major plot element and yet is not, so to speak, an ‘advocacy film’ on the subject; in a sense, its cavalier acceptance of transgenderism (voluntary or not) makes it more progressive than films that would only think to present the lead character as a pitiful victim of bullies and bigots.  Most importantly, The Assignment revisits many of the themes that populate Hill’s best films, in particular the struggle for identity in an absurd world and the insistence on abiding by some sort of moral code in order to hold off slipping into complete chaos and animality.  Hill’s heroes are rarely angelic, but they are always contrasted with markedly more violent and depraved villains; (the Warriors versus the other gangs in The Warriors, 1979, the lone gunfighter versus the organized mobsters in Last Man Standing, 1996, etc.).  Hill is an idiosyncratic auteur and you either enjoy his style and themes as they relate from film to film or you won’t see what the big deal is at all.  Good luck.