The Film: 2/5

Originally titled Tomboy: A Revenger’s Tale but later given the more generic official title of The Assignment (not to be confused with Christian Duguay’s 1997 thriller starring Aidan Quinn, Donald Sutherland, and Ben Kingsley, Walter Hill’s first big screen effort since his Sylvester Stallone actioner Bullet to the Head flopped at the box office five years ago limps onto home video after a brief stint playing the film festival circuit to little fanfare.

Double-crossed by gangster Honest John (Anthony LaPaglia) and beaten into unconsciousness by his goons, hitman Frank Kitchen (Michelle Rodriguez with a fake goatee that would have made Evil Spock chortle) wakes up some time later in a grungy motel room to discover that he has been the subject of a forced sex change operation. The culprit is Dr. Rachel Jane (Sigourney Weaver), an unhinged surgeon who put Kitchen under her skilled knife after discovering the professional hired killer was responsible for the murder of her brother Sebastien (Adrian Hough).

In a city that’s clearly Canadian (Vancouver, to be exact) but we’re expected to believe is San Francisco without any establishing shots to convince us, the newly female Frank seeks neo-noir revenge on the mad doctor and her unwitting underlings with plenty of headshots, flashbacks, and a side romance with a pretty nurse (Caitlin Gerard) who may or may not be what she seems.

I never thought I would live to see Walter Hill working on autopilot, but then again, I always thought Hill would outlive me. Now here I am and after watching The Assignment I am full of conflicting emotions. On one hand, I’m glad as hell that it’s over and I’ll never have to watch it again, but on the other, it’s disheartening to see one of your filmmaking idols take an intriguing concept for a down-and-dirty thriller steeped in blood and subtext and strip away everything that could have made it a worthwhile effort in his filmography.

Hill spent years reworking a script that novelist Denis Hamill wrote in 1978 – the year Hill made The Driver – and when he finally got around to making into his latest punchy underworld crime drama, it was just as anti-LGBTQ politicians across the U.S. were whipping their easily duped constituents into a frothing frenzy over the rights of transgender and transsexual citizens to use the public restroom corresponding to their identified gender. Building a film around the concept of an antihero forced to undergo a sex change is bad enough, but in the hands of its makers, it never becomes anything more than an excuse for said antihero to go on a killing spree.

Framing devices are often essential in storytelling, but two of them are a sign of desperation. In this case, we get to watch Weaver’s bat shit medico, spouting quotes from Shakespeare and Poe with all the passion and skill of a local news anchor reading from a teleprompter, recount her version of the film’s events to a wily psychiatrist (Tony Shalhoub, the acting MVP of The Assignment) in an asylum, while Frank dictates her own story directly into a video camera. We never find out to whom the video is supposed, and since Michelle Rodriguez is already pulling double duty as the movie’s narrator (reciting phony tough dialogue that Frank Miller might have wrote on an hour’s sleep), this is just a lazy and trite way to stretch the running time out to feature-length when it might have played better as a half-hour short film.

Rodriguez spends the entire movie looking regretful over taking the role of Frank Kitchen to begin with. Frank is unlikeable, a barren wasteland of a character, and outside of a scene where she consults with another surgeon over the possibility of having her procedure reversed, nothing ever happens to humanize her. We didn’t know much about Frank when she was a man, and we know less about her once she wakes up from Dr. Jane’s operation. Hill could have subverted expectations by using this plot development to have his main character explore their new femininity, but instead he buries what potential The Assignment possessed in its inception in endless poorly-staged shootouts and a narrative structure that stumbles from flashback to framing device to other framing device with the grace and coherence of a drunk driver trying to walk in a straight line for the amusement of bored highway patrolmen.

The cinematography by James Liston, whose prior greatest accomplishment was lensing several episodes of Supergirl, soaks in the rainy ambience of the Canada-style California city setting. Admirably backed up by Raney Shockne’s (The To Do List) moody synth score, with Giorgio Moroder (Scarface) contributing the film’s Vangelis-influenced theme, and nearly ruined at times by the same sort of cheap comic book panel scene transitions that pretty much throttled the life out of Hill’s unnecessary director’s cut of The Warriors, the modern noir atmosphere conjured throughout The Assignment – along with the occasional unintentionally hilarious line of dime novel dialogue and Tony Shalhoub’s performance – is about the only thing I will remember about it.

Audio/Video: 4/5

Lionsgate’s 2.39:1 framed widescreen presentation of The Assignment looks rock solid in 1080p high-definition. Encoded in MPEG-4 AVC, the transfer isn’t a visual stunner, but it remains true to the intentions of the filmmakers, with colors that pop and extra-strength clarity that really brings out the unpleasant details in the set design and illuminates the neon-drenched downtown city streets and authentic skin tones (that often shift like a mood ring depending on the scene) to pleasurable effect. The English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is the sole listening option on this disc, but it’s more than enough to suit the modest needs of the main feature. Dialogue, music, and ambient effects bleed together marvelously and never risk creating overlap or distortion. This being a Walter Hill joint, gunshots and punches make the greatest impact. English and Spanish subtitles have also been provided.

Extras: 0/5

DVD and Blu-ray releases of Walter Hill’s films usually don’t get the voluminous supplements they deserve until a company like Shout! Factory comes along and springs for collector’s edition re-releases. I don’t ever anticipate that happening with a haplessly minor entry in the man’s cinematic canon like The Assignment, so you’ll just have to settle for “Filmmaking Portraits” (2 minutes), a video still gallery of behind-the-scenes photos set to narration by Rodriguez from the movie, and upfront trailers for The Girl with All the Gifts, Come and Find Me, John Wick: Chapter 2, I Am Wrath, and Mechanic: Resurrection. A DVD copy and Digital HD download code are also included, but this is still a no-frills package.

Overall: 2/5

Few things pain me as much as seeing filmmakers I have long admired working with material far beneath their talents to pay the bills, resulting in subpar flicks containing the faintest traces of the greatness they exhibited in their prime behind the camera. Walter Hill has made some bona fide action masterpieces, a few legitimately great films, and a handful of decent time-wasters, but never an outright bad movie. While his career may never end up scraping the bottom of the celluloid barrel, The Assignment comes close. It’s dull, confused, and lacking in narrative and stylistic ambition.