Interview With A Hitman

Bottom line: Interview With A Hitman leaves you saying "You went along way for that..." with its uninspired violence and even less inspired story.

1/4

Interview With A Hitman begins with a close-up of a handgun. A young boy is aiming at a young girl. He slowly pulls the trigger but, before we see it fire, the camera cuts to a large airplane landing. 

This initial sequence gave me a bad feeling about the movie because it could mean one of two things. If the boy killed the little girl then this is going to be one of those 'super intense/disturbing' European films. It probably won't be very good because it will be so concerned with shock effect. But, alright, I haven’t seen one of those movies in a while. Now, if the boy didn't kill the little girl, then it is going to be another cliché action movie like Hitman or Driver.

Getting off the plane, we see Viktor (Goss), the hitman. How do you know it is Viktor the hitman? Hitmen are always skinny, serious looking white men with shaved heads (see Hitman or any Jason Statham movie). He broods on over to his hotel and goes for a run. Right as he starts to jog, I thought, I bet he is going to dream about the woman he loves. Sure enough, as soon as he puts his headphones on, we are shown images of a bright white bed. He turns over to see a beautiful woman sleeping. He slides her nightgown down and we see several scars on her shoulder. I bet he saved her from an abusive world and they fell in love…

Jumping back to Viktor, we see that he wasn't just getting some exercise but scoping out his next target. You know, I am just going to summarize from here on out. I was going to talk about how this subplot of this pedophile reporter who interview Viktor to get back in the limelight but, quite frankly, it isn't worth it. In short, the rest of the movie is spent with Viktor giving his biography: He was a kid who has grown up in a poor abusive mob-run environment (Romania) and learns how to be the best hitman in the world. He does a number of jobs in Romania and London. Before he moves onto the next city, he is asked to do one more job by a London mobster. Sitting alone at an empty restaurant, Viktor has a glass of wine. This isn't part of the job. He is just getting a glass of wine. In walks a poor man’s Angelina Jolie; Caroline Tillette playing the role of Bethesda complete with plump lips, long dark hair and strong eye brows. She sits down alone and repeatedly looks over to Viktor. She gets up to leave and is jumped by three thugs. She is taken into the back to be raped while Viktor gets up to leave. He opens the front door and, suddenly, images of his abused mother come into his mind. Of course he goes back, saves her, falls in love and decides to leave the crime world.

This sexist type of "big strong man saves the attractive little lady" situation really burns me up. I think I will devote a separate post for that. It is sad that only thing refreshing about this is that there was no gratuitous nudity.

I wasn't the biggest fan of the look of the film either: lots of shadows, shifts in focus and shaky handheld camerawork. It looks like it was trying to be a Daniel Craig-James Bond/Bourne kind of movie. So nothing new, nothing inspiring is going on here.

"Was it the environment that turned him into a stone cold killer or was it his nature"? That is the big philosophical question of the movie. Unfortunately, the film doesn't really delve into it. We have an angry little kid who is willing to kill. Is it for money or power or what? It isn't really clear. Somehow he is able to, at the drop of a hat, switch away from a life of contract killing. We aren’t really involved with the story or characters.

Overall, Interview With A Hitman is just a bunch of hitman clichés thrown into one. Don't waste your time on this one.

Written and directed by Perry Bhandal. Starring Luke Goss (Viktor), Caroline Tillette (Bethesda) and Stephen Marcus (Traffikant)