Killin' just got a little sexified.
I saw The Assassin in 93 or 94 when it was released on VHS, and who knows it might have seemed edgy then. If that was the case it has not aged well…
Bridget Fonda is Maggie, an unruly junkie street urchin running on fumes who makes a monumental mistake which ends in her execution…
Short film! Or else…
Thanks to Bob (Gabriel Byrne) tales of Maggie’s death are premature. She is given less a choice but an ultimatum: work for us or we’ll carry out the previously agreed upon sentence.
Maggie reluctantly agrees to be trained up as a female hit-girl in a top secret underground facility, describing her ensuing weeks and months makes me feel all Walt ‘Clyde’ Frazier-like:
Maggie starts out so deliciously dystopian. So stylishly slovenly. So beautifully bedraggled.
In what seems like a couple of short montages she is transformed from trash-mouth to top agent. Impetuous to impeccable. Conspicuously disagreeable to clinically destructive. Feral to fatal.
An amateur to an assassin.
Upon her ‘graduation’ it appears that ‘management’ are still unconvinced as to Maggie’s bona fides but they agree to give her a trial, and after 90 days if they are not totally satisfied with their product they will discontinue the line.
In the ensuing days of release Maggie is left alone to forge her own path, only being occasionally interrupted to perform a job, which usually ends in a miscellaneous someone’s passing. Along the way Maggie latches onto a hairy young man played by Dermot Mulroney, and while she has promised to never reveal her true role this becomes more difficult as they grow closer.
The film is a remake of a far better French film called La Femme Nikita, because the American producers didn’t have to spend precious time and money developing a script they over-compensated with crafting some of the most lavish desolation on film, again this might have passed for grimy in the 90s but now the early sequences and background actors look like they come straight from a perfume commercial.
Fonda strives to be unruly and difficult but again comes across as merely over-acting and petulant, and the gradual dilemma of remaining true to her training or starting afresh with the handsome hirsute stranger provides precious little tension or confusion.
I bet Gabriel Byrne regrets having this on his resume, even though in truth the film isn’t that awful. The action sequences are average to middling, the plot quite obvious and predictable and the production detailed to within a speck of its life.
So why a 6?
Simple. The Assassin is the film in which Harvey Keitel plays a cameo as a guy called ‘The Cleaner’, this four of five minute sequence has also aged badly, but after my first viewing in the 90s I thought he was the coolest cat going around. This memory alone is responsible for the 6.
Final Rating – 6 / 10. Watching stuff like The Assassin convinces me that you can’t make things look run down and ruined with lots of money. So how does Paris Hilton do it?
