Over on Kung Pew Video, I’ve been revisiting the direct-to-video relics that raised us. This week: The Hitman.
Sailor Hates Chuck
My friend Sailor here at ScreenAge Wasteland hates Chuck Norris, and we have this running joke between us where I tell him I’m watching something cool that he should check out, and when he asks me what it is, I say The Hitman. Usually followed by him hurling some obscenity my way.
His point is, Chuck can’t act. Or how does he put it? Chuck Norris is a black hole of charisma. Something like that.
And I mean, look, fair enough. Chuck is no thespian. But my rebuttal to that is that we don’t watch his movies for his charm and acting talent. We watch his movies to see him kick bad guys in the face. But if there’s one movie that uses whatever acting talent he does possess to best possible effect, it’s The Hitman.
Before what I’m saying here gets misinterpreted, let me make it clear: I’m not saying Chuck turns in a stellar performance. The Hitman mostly requires that he stay silent and look dangerous. And maybe you’re thinking What’s so hard about that? Anyone could do that.
But that’s not really the point. The point I always make to my friend Sailor is that, if your problem with Chuck’s movies is his acting, of all of his movies, The Hitman is probably your best shot at enjoying one of ‘em.
Now that may not sound like much of a sales pitch, but stick with me a few minutes and let me see if I can convince you.
The Back of the VHS Box
The Hitman was written by Robert Geoffrion and Don Carmody and directed by Aaron Norris, Chuck’s younger brother and frequent collaborator. Produced by Cannon Pictures just before it pooped the bed a few years later in ‘94, The Hitman is about a good cop who is betrayed by his dirty partner. Norris plays our hero Cliff Garret, while the dirty partner, Ronny “Del” Delany, is played by genre veteran and frequent Quentin Tarantino collaborator Michael Parks. When Cliff stumbles onto a drug ring he shouldn’t have, Del shoots him and leaves him for dead.
But we all know you can’t kill Chuck Norris.
So, yeah, he lives. But his boss decides to let the outside world believe he’s dead in order to get the bad guys. Or something.
You Can’t Kill Chuck
The setup is flimsy as hell, but it kind of comes with the territory. Just one year earlier, Steven Seagal’s second film, Hard to Kill, followed essentially the same plot setup. Good cop left for dead doesn’t die and later comes back for revenge. If it stretches the imagination, who cares? Everything about these movies stretches the imagination if you think too much about it all.
Anyway, when we see Chuck next, he’s no longer Cliff. Now he’s Danny Grogan, a hard-edged hitman for hire who has embedded himself in the local crime boss’s organization in order to bring it down from within.
The Hitman is a pretty standard revenge action thriller for the time, but when Chuck’s not punching holes in Italian mobsters or blowing the legs off of Iranian drug dealers (yeah, you didn’t read that wrong), he’s fighting racism. There’s a subplot that has Chuck’s Grogan take a young neighbor kid who is being bullied by the neighborhood racist buttheads under his wing and teach him karate and model making. This movie gets dragged for the melodrama of these scenes, but I find them to be a wholesome contrast against the rest of the film’s much darker content.
You’ve Never Seen Chuck Like This
The Hitman is violent and honestly pretty graphic. Grogan whacks people with no remorse at all, and for most of the movie it’s hard to tell if he’s really playing for the good guys or if he’s just here to take his frustrations out on the less savory characters of the world.
Either way, there’s plenty of action spanning cobblestone streets, industrial locations, and boat docks, with Grogan using his signature sawed-off shotgun very liberally and his sidekicks a bit more conservatively. Early in the film, to establish just how much Chuck’s character has changed, we see him remorselessly blast a mob lieutenant just for talking smack about him. This is a different character for Norris, and The Hitman is a bit of a strange movie for him. It might even be described as mean-spirited and a bit grotesque, which is why I think the lighter scenes with him and the kid, Tim, were necessary. These scenes show us that there’s still some humanity left in our hero.
The movie ends with a bang, and the final image it leaves us with is a brutal reminder that this is a much darker Chuck Norris than we are used to.
Come for the Action, Stay for the Melodrama
Now what works about The Hitman?
Well, the action is solid. I mean, you can’t go wrong with watching Chuck bust people up with his fists and feet, and the action set pieces and shootouts are well-staged and carried off surprisingly well considering Aaron Norris’s previous work on movies like Delta Force II, which I watched recently and remembered having better action sequences than it actually does. There are some great shoot outs and a fun chase sequence at the climax of the film.
But one of the most cold-blooded scenes in the film sees Grogan waltz into a Middle Eastern restaurant and confront a table full of Iranian drug dealers. He confidently samples their food with his fingers and then spits it out, insulting their taste in cuisine, while washing his fingers in the leader’s glass of water. Needless to say, these fellas aren’t thrilled with Grogan’s lack of appreciation for their culture and threaten him with bodily harm. A few minutes and a few roundhouses later, the restaurant is in shambles and the handful of thugs are bloodied and moaning, covered in the spoiled remains of their dinner.
And that’s probably one of the least violent action scenes of the movie.
That Guy
The acting in this is more than adequate for an action movie from this era, but whatever charisma Chuck’s performance lacks is more than made up for by Michael Parks. It’s really too bad his character is missing from the entire second act of the film, because he brings a level of gritty realism to the film that elevates every scene he’s in. His lines come off sounding natural, even when he’s talking about being so horny he could have intercourse with mud. Yeah, that’s a line in the film.
That guy actor from Cagney & Lacey and lots of other stuff from this era, Al Waxman, turns in a perfectly believable performance as mob boss Marco Luganni, and Bruno Gerussi brings some gravitas in a small but solid turn as one of Luganni’s enforcers. There’s an oddly touching scene between him, his character’s brother, and a horse that I won’t spoil. But you’ll know it when you see it. Alberta Watson plays Christine, Luganni’s legal counsel and love interest for Chuck’s character, and she’s great when she’s on screen, but she’s not given much to do.
And That Guy
And given the amount of violence in the movie, I’m surprised there’s no nudity, even though the film does allude to a fairly raunchy scene between Watson’s Christine and Norris’s Grogan. Salim Grant plays Tim, the neighbor boy Grogan helps out, with a wide-eyed innocence that is easy to laugh at, but I think his performance actually works well here, and as far as kid actors go, this is not the worst I’ve seen.
The other guy worth mentioning here is Frank Ferrucci as the main Iranian baddie. The Hitman sets up Ferrucci’s Shahad as a kind of foil to Chuck’s Grogan, and I think the movie kind of wastes him as an actor and character. The guy has got great screen presence, and it would have been nice to see him put up a bit more resistance before he meets his grisly end. But even if he’s not that well utilized, the movie is better with him in it, and he’s another one of those actors that was all over genre TV back then.
The Hitman is a Vibe
Many of the film’s actors are Canadian, which I guess makes sense since The Hitman was primarily shot in and around Vancouver, British Columbia. Which is another check mark in the movie’s plus column. The way cinematographer Joao Fernandez shot Vancouver adds texture and mood to the film, and together with the jazzy score by Joel Derouin, the end result is a kind of smooth, smoky, and cold noir vibe that is just fun to revisit from time to time.
From time to time being about once a year in my case. Yeah, it may not be a popular opinion, but I think The Hitman’s mix of action, violence, melodrama, quirkiness, and overall vibe make it one of Chuck’s more rewatchable movies. It’s just so of its time. If you enjoy late 80s–early 90s action, add The Hitman to your list. And if you hate it, don’t tell my friend Sailor.
Kung Pew Video is where I dig into the neon-drenched, straight-to-VHS corner of film history. New episodes weekly. Be kind. Subscribe. See ya in the VHS wasteland.
