The Assignment (2016)

THE ASSIGNMENT  (2016)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Walter Hill
    Michelle Rodriguez, Sigourney Weaver, Terry Chen,
    Tony Shalhoub, Caitlin Gerard, Anthony LaPaglia
This is like a Sam Fuller movie for the 21st century, a twisted pulp thriller starring Michelle Rodriguez as a tough guy/hit man named Frank Kitchen. Frank has to deal with some dangerous people in his line of work - he's used to that - but things really turn nasty when he bumps off the worthless brother of a prominent plastic surgeon played by Sigourney Weaver. It seems the doc was quite attached to her brother, and she hires her own team of thugs to jump Frank and whisk him away to an off-the-grid operating room, where some unplanned, unscheduled and emphatically unwanted gender-reassignment surgery takes place. That leaves Frank still plenty tough (and plenty pissed off), but no longer a guy, and somebody's going to pay for that. A lot of people. Rodriguez is perfectly cast as the surly, hard-boiled killer. There's even a trace of Brando in her delivery. Besides which, she's fearless: You'd have to be to even attempt something like this. Weaver's as cold as ice in the Arctic, calmly telling her story from behind the locked doors of a mental institution, where she spends her days reading Shakespeare and Poe while confined to a straightjacket. Hill's script and direction come at you like a slug from a .45, Frank Kitchen's weapon of choice, and a reminder that while Sam Fuller's no longer around to make deranged movies like this, we can still thank the cinema gods that Walter Hill is.