The Hit

Stephen Frears is one of England's most esoteric filmmakers. With pictures ranging from My Beautiful Laundrette, Prick Up Your Ears, Sammy and Rosie Get Laid, and Dangerous Liaisons in the 1980s to The Grifters, Hero, and The Van in the '90s to High Fidelity, Dirty Pretty Things, and The Queen in the Aughts, and Tamara Drewe, Philomena, and Florence Foster Jenkins most recently. His second film as a director, The Hit, was also the feature film debut of the young Tim Roth and one of many comebacks for swinging-'60s icon Terence Stamp. Though Stamp never stopped working and made a huge impression on kids my age playing General Zod in Superman and Superman II, by 1984, he hadn't had a starring role in a movie for more than a decade.

So it's fitting that in The Hit, Stamp plays a retired London gangster living in seclusion in Spain ten years after ratting on his old mobster cronies in exchange for personal immunity and a comfortable exile. But his past catches up with him in the form of two hit men (the seasoned, heartless John Hurt and the loss-cannon upstart Tim Roth) who've been hired to drive him to Paris to be executed by those he turned against. While set in the crime picture milieu, The Hit is essentially a shaggy road movie with existential preoccupations about three lead characters who don't exactly enjoy each other's company, exchanging philosophies, getting into arguments, taking many detours, and dealing with a series of setbacks that cause their journey to be far more meandering that any of them anticipated. It's a cool film with three memorable performances, smartly directed by Frears.