The Hit

“A British film directed by Stephen Frears (of High Fidelity, among many others) in which a former criminal (Terence Stamp) testifies against his former associates and goes into hiding in Spain under police protection, until he’s eventually found and grabbed by two men hired to bring him to Paris to face the music (John Hurt and a baby-faced Tim Roth, in his first big role at age 23). The unusual spin the script puts on this setup is that Stamp spends most of the film confounding his kidnappers by apparently being genuinely at peace with his fate and making no particular attempt to escape or interfere with them. This has a lot of proto-Tarantino vibe to it in the pairing of Roth’s chatty, impulsive junior criminal with Hurt’s coldly silent professional, and in addition to the beautiful location shooting in the Spanish countryside, it features a few moments of genuine poetry, both literal and visual, that elevate it above a more run-of-the-mill crime story. (Available on the Criterion Channel.)”