Portrait Of A Hitman (DVD)

Jimbuck is a professional hitman, and is very good at his job. Then his boss, Max, asks him to kill someone, a brain surgeon called Bob Michaels, who is a good friend of Jimbuck's and once saved his life. Suddenly, the cool hitman develops a conscience and struggles to come to terms with his task, even when he finds Michaels in bed with his own girlfriend. Admitting defeat, he asks Max for leniency, promising to hit another of Max's enemies instead. ...
...Or has he finally reached the end of the road?

This film was made back in the seventies, yet I recognise the name; for this reason alone, I didn't really expect anything much of it. However, it does star Jack Palance, who is a well-known actor, probably best-known to a modern audience for his role in City Slickers. And as performances go, Palance gives a good one as Jimbuck (I think his name is Jim Buck, but everyone runs the two syllables ... more

Jimbuck is a professional hitman, and is very good at his job. Then his boss, Max, asks him to kill someone, a brain surgeon called Bob Michaels, who is a good friend of Jimbuck's and once saved his life. Suddenly, the cool hitman develops a conscience and struggles to come to terms with his task, even when he finds Michaels in bed with his own girlfriend. Admitting defeat, he asks Max for leniency, promising to hit another of Max's enemies instead. Can Jimbuck go ahead with his career as a hitman? Or has he finally reached the end of the road?

This film was made back in the seventies, yet I recognise the name; for this reason alone, I didn't really expect anything much of it. However, it does star Jack Palance, who is a well-known actor, probably best-known to a modern audience for his role in City Slickers. And as performances go, Palance gives a good one as Jimbuck (I think his name is Jim Buck, but everyone runs the two syllables together so that it sounds like one name); he certainly looks and acts the part of a hitman. As far as character development goes though, Palance doesn't really have a great deal to work with here. In fact, he doesn't have all that much in the way of lines - he appears in the majority of shots, but, more often than not, is chasing someone or being chased rather than speaking. And although he supposedly goes through a life-changing experience, we don't really get much of an opportunity to understand how it affects him. The writer makes him an artist on the side, which is presumably supposed to show his softer side, but as it doesn't go anywhere, this is really just a waste of time. This is not Palance's fault though, just bad script-writing.

Rod Steiger plays Max. Steiger is a well-known actor in his own right in the US, having roles in films like Batman, In the Heat of the Night and The Amityville Horror. Max is not a role that really stretches him in the slightest; he isn't a particularly nice man, which Steiger manages to portray with very little difficulty, but that is as far as the role lets him go. To be honest, I'm surprised that he even bothered to take this role on. The same goes for Bo Svenson, who plays Bob Michaels, a good-looking doctor who attracts the ladies - there is just no depth to the character.

On paper, the synopsis looks as though this could be quite an interesting film. And maybe, with a good writer, it could have been. Unfortunately with director/writer combination of Allan A Buckhantz and Yabo Yablonsky, any good ideas to make this into a better film seem to have flown out of the window. The story is incredibly badly told. It starts out okay with a brief visual explanation of Jimbuck's career, then cuts to Max asking Jimbuck to 'hit' Dr Michaels. After that, things go a bit haywire, when other hits become wound into the story, but without any explanation of whether they have anything to do with the main thread of the story. Either some kind of narration was needed or a conversation to explain what was happening - as it is, I was left scratching my head, until I realised I didn't really care all that much. And the ending is so unexciting that when the film finished, I thought I'd missed something.

This is a film about a hitman - the clue is in the title - and there is obviously some violence. However, it is nothing like as graphic as it could have been. This is mainly because most of the violence takes place in the dark and, because the quality of the film is poor, everything is very unclear. However, the deaths that we do get to see are fairly clean - they die from bullets that don't seem to make any kind of mess at all. At the beginning of the film there is a shot of a man trying to shoot a dog from a helicopter and he does manage to hit its leg, which made me cringe more than anything that came after. There may have been a reason for it, but we weren't given one, which left me with a bad taste in my mouth - I can't stand violence towards animals, particularly if it is pointless. There is a rating of 15 on the film - I think this is about right.

The film seems to have been made on a budget, despite the relatively well-known actors in the lead roles. There certainly wasn't much money spent on lighting, because as mentioned, much of the action takes place in the half light and it is very difficult to see what is going on, or who is doing what to whom. The quality of the DVD is also poor, clearly no-one thought it was worth cleaning the film up before putting it on DVD - for obvious reasons. And after the opening scenes from a helicopter, the set is boring, consisting of a number of faceless buildings that all seemed to merge into one.

There is an extra with the DVD - a trailer for the movie. As this incorporates the only decent bits from the film, it makes it look marginally better than it is...but only just.

I think it's probably clear from the above that I didn't think much of this film. The story is badly told, and although the performances are reasonable, the actors are given no scope to develop their characters. With the bad cinematography on top of this, there really isn't much of a reason to bother watching this film unless you are a huge fan of Jack Palance or Rod Steiger. Thankfully, I didn't pay for the pleasure of watching - someone gave me a copy. Not recommended.

The DVD is available from play.com from £2.04.

Classification: 15

Running time: 86 minutes
 

...less