The Assignment (2016)

Sadly Over-hyped

A different way of telling a story

Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.

The storyline feels a little thin and moth-eaten in parts but this sequel is plenty of fun.

I thoroughly enjoyed watching, "The Assignment". I love the actresses, story line, and intrigue over what happened next. I have no idea why these reviewers gave it such a low score, but imagine these people are why we have Trump as a president.

Outrageous and wildly un-PC story has hit-man Frank Kitchen, a bearded Michelle Rodriguez, kidnapped and forcibly given gender reassignment surgery by doctor Sigourney Weaker as revenge for Kitchen's killing of her mobster brother. Kitchen wakes up from the surgery to find himself now a woman, but Kitchen is now determined to find out who did this to him so he/she can exact his/her revenge. From there, the film is a fairly standard revenge picture along the lines of "Point Blank" or "Oldboy" where Kitchen works his way up the food chain of underworld figures until he reaches his eventual final target. Anthony LaPaglia, who I don't think I've seen in years and was quite excited to see in something again, plays one of those targets who double crossed Kitchen. Tony Shalhoub also has a juicy role as an interrogator taking a statement from Weaver in a Death and the Maiden-like verbal sparing match, where Weaver narrates the events of the film and serves as film's framing device. Produced, written, directed by Walter Hill, he brings an assured hand to the action and fills the script with his usual tough clipped dialogue. I was about to write that this is Hill's best work in years, but it's really just Hill's first film as director in many years. Hopefully he's been living comfortably off of his producer credits on all of the Alien sequels and prequels, but it's exciting to see Hill return to his scrappy low-budget action film roots with this outlandish action flick. "The Assignment" also boasts a score by the great Giorgio Moroder (with orchestrations by and some additional music by Raney Shockne), which is Moroder's first feature film score since the 1990s. Now if you were wondering if the film has a subtext around gender politics, violence again women, and such, it does not. Hill's film is less like The Wachowski's rich genre and gender mixing "Bound" and is more similar to Steven Soderbergh's "Haywire," which was more just a straight-up action film focused on Gina Carano kicking ass (but with a bit more pulpy Roger Corman/Samuel Z. Arkoff exploitation thrown in for good measure). Overall, "The Assignment" is a must see for fans of Hill and 1970s style of gritty pulpy action films.

I watched this film because one of my family members who is naive to the way Amazon operates put it on because it was suggested by Prime. Productions like this is the very reason I personally refuse to order a Prime membership. It's so obvious it's an Illuminati social engineering film meant to program behavior and philosophies into the audience. Needless to say usually I don't watch stuff like this but I decided to watch this time to see what passes for mainstream entertainment these days. As I said, this was a sick film... Cursing, nudity & promiscuity, killing, back stabbing, and general evil behavior; it made me think of a bunch of demons scrambling to get to the top like a bucket of crabs. They only thing that was sorta good was that none of the characters where good but none completely evil either. Me

Actually, it was a much better film than what I've heard of it. What could you expect from a B movie? This was a much better film for its small budget with a decent cast. The storyline seems okay, but Michelle Rodriguez is the one who made it possible. Yeah, it was like created for her to play the main role and she excelled. The filmmaking was quite compromised when the initial part of her character was played by herself. Because of particularly her height, but decently convinces us with all the rest of the makeovers.The film was about an assassin, who after encountering some wrong men, discovers later that he'd went through gender reassignment surgery. Now raged with anger, he begins his hunt whoever behind it, especially finding the reason for. With a small romance and action sequences, the film comes to an end. Before giving it a try, you must understand that it is not the film you should expect to be a masterpiece. It tried its best to narrate a decent story, as well as you get your entertainment along. So it is not a must see, but still worth a watch.6/10