Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Hit! Blu-ray Movie Review

Mission: Improbable.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman April 23, 2012

The early seventies were a heady time for African Americans wanting to make their mark in feature films and television. The turmoil of the late sixties had seemingly opened the floodgates用erhaps aided by a liberal dose of guilt if nothing else葉hat finally started offering blacks much more sizable and decent roles than all but a few like Sidney Poitier had enjoyed in the previous generation. Bill Cosby had taken home multiple Emmy awards as the co-star of I Spy, Gail Fisher had won one herself for her work on Mannix, and more and more black actors and actresses were finally getting their chances to star in major feature films. Some of these outings were lumped into the "Blaxploitation" genre, but looking back on the seventies as a whole, there really was a perhaps surprisingly wide assortment of films that at the very least offered strong supporting roles for black actors, and more than a few that featured a host of black stars. The seventies saw the rise of many African American actors who would have considerable impact on the big screen, including Diana Ross (of course already a legend in the music business), Cicely Tyson, and Billy Dee Williams. One of Williams' first big cinema successes was actually in Lady Sings the Blues with Ross, and he would soon parlay his matinee idol good looks, suave manner and distinctive speaking voice into an incredibly long-lived career on both the small and large screens. Hit! is in fact a Lady Sings the Blues reunion of sorts, pairing star Williams with co-star Richard Pryor and director Sidney J. Furie, and while the two films have a certain common subtext, namely the ravages of drugs, but they really couldn't be more different in tone and substantive content. If Lady Sings the Blues rethought the Hollywood biopic in post-modern terms, Hit! manages to hint at the Blaxploitation genre (without ever really delving into it in any meaningful way) while it evinces a gritty and tough ambience which may be highly improbable but which, due to Williams' personal magnetism, manages to find its target more than might be expected.

It's a little ironic that Hit!'s score is by Lalo Schifrin, for the set up of this film plays in a way like a Mission: Impossible episode (Schifrin of course provided the iconic theme for that series), where government operative Nick Allen (Billy Dee Williams) sets out to avenge the death of his daughter from a heroin overdose. (It should be mentioned in passing that Schifrin's "theme" for Hit!, if it can be called that, is a very Mission: Impossible-esque percussion piece featuring snare drum and bongos, much like his famous cues for the television show.) Nick seems to have a portfolio of connections, kind of like Jim Phelps in the iconic television series, and he makes his way from person to person early in the film as he attempts to ferret out how the "chain of command" works in order to track down the source of the drugs. Furie has already let us know via a ping ponging element in these early scenes that the manufacturers and suppliers are a coterie of wealthy (and snooty of course) Frenchmen in and around Marseilles, setting up an eventual showdown.

In another Lalo Schifrin theme reference, Nick is given a computer printout by a girlfriend of his of various names of people who might aid in his quest, something that brings to mind the first, computer-centric, season of Mannix. The middle portion of the film then revolves around Nick recruiting his own version of an Impossible Mission Force, albeit one perhaps a little less intrinsically suited to this line of work than the IMF gang of yore. He gets a heroin addicted hooker (played by Gwen Welles, an actress who died much too young after eschewing traditional forms of cancer treatment in favor of naturopathic remedies, and an actress who bears a strong resemblance to Parker Posey), an elderly couple whose son was killed by drug thugs, and a metal worker named Mike (Richard Pryor) whose wife was raped and murdered by another drug thug. Nick's plan is to have all of these people achieve their own personal vengeance along with his own, and they set about getting training for their tasks.

What this structure means is that well over two thirds of Hit! is devoted to set up, and since the film clocks in at over two hours, that in turn means there's an awful lot of waiting before the payoff. This portion of the film can seem interminable at times, but it's bolstered by some find character bits by the supporting cast, even if it all reeks of improbability and in fact downright absurdity at times. Once the film moves into its rather short third act, when the team finally matriculates to France to pull off a spectacular series of assassinations, it's exciting, but it may be a case of too little too late for some impatient viewers.

The killing spree is both gruesome and kind of hilarious at the same time. The elderly couple each dispatches their targets with a fair amount of gore, and then runs through the French city streets to rejoin their tour bus, claiming they've been out shopping. The best bit, as hyperbolic as it is, involves Williams, who is masquerading as a pipe layer on the estate of the main French kingpin. It turns out part of his pipe is actually a bazooka, not exactly the most subtle weapon imaginable for a circumspect hit. In fact the entire film is so far removed from reality that it's almost pointless to comment on its ridiculousness. Hit! basically just wants to get the viewer to the "big" moments without expending too much brain power on how it arrived there, which of course begs the question as to why it takes so long to get there.

Hit! is unabashedly silly and illogical, but it's also remarkably entertaining in its own way. Furie does a great job contrasting the nascent crew of would be assassins with the obsequious French coalition in their limousines and Baroque mansions, and the film, as with many of Furie's outings, has a nice visual flair. There's an exciting car chase scene midway through the film when Nick's former government buddies, who are out to kill him before he can kill others, chase him down a freeway as he decides to go the wrong way on a one way interstate to avoid being captured, and the French scenes especially are quite picturesque, something distinctly at odds with sort of grimy, gritty drug addled ambience of the film. Williams is magnetic as always, if perhaps a bit too clench-jawed, and Pryor is mostly effective in a role that has a few comedic elements but really isn't what one thinks of as being a "standard" role for this unique performer. This Hit! may not in fact be a home run, but it's a solid double or even triple if it's taken on its own kind of silly merits.

Hit! Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Hit! is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Olive Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. For the most part, this is a well above average high definition presentation that boasts a sharp and well defined image that has obviously not been processed or restored in any way, shape or form. There's quite a bit of damage inherent in the elements, with quite a few scratches, blotches and white specks and flecks along the way. Colors are fairly robust, but seem just slightly skewed to the yellow side of things, especially (and perhaps understandably) in the sun drenched French sequences. Fine detail is very appealing in close-ups and depth of field in the many outdoor shots is excellent. There are some very minor stability issues (note the flickering background in the early scene with Williams in the cemetery for a good example), but overall this is a sharp and clear presentation that is nicely filmic and recreates an early seventies ambience quite well.

Hit! Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Hit!'s lossless DTS-HD Master Audio Mono mix is sufficient, though hardly spectacular. This is a film that certainly could have benefited from at the very least a stereo track, if not a full surround repurposing, especially given the large latitude of locations and ambient environmental sounds in a lot of the outdoor sequences. That said, fidelity is mostly excellent, though dialogue does have a tendency to get slightly buried in the mix at times (for example, I still have no idea what Williams' last line in the film is). Schifrin's score sounds great (it's made up of variations on one kind of Gallic, Michel Legrand-esque, theme aside from the percussion elements). The track is obviously narrow and perhaps too busy at times, but overall it's presented here with decent clarity, and some very good dynamic range.

Hit! Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

As is standard on these Olive Films releases of Paramount catalog titles, there are no supplements of any kind on the disc.

Hit! Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Hit! is a surprisingly fun film, despite its lopsided structure which spends too much time on the setup and not enough on the payoff, and its patently ridiculous plot, which is almost like The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight Goes to France. But somehow it all hangs together, if barely at times, and the cast is uniformly quite good. Furie lenses a really picturesque film, rather odd for this type of outing, and Hit! is usually entertaining even when it's not making a lot of sense. This Blu-ray sports good video and decent audio and comes Recommended.