7.3 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
A federal agent whose daughter dies of a heroin overdose is determined to destroy the drug ring that supplied her. He recruits various people whose lives have been torn apart by the drug trade and trains them. Then they all leave for France to track down and destroy the ring.
Starring: Billy Dee Williams, Richard Pryor, Paul HamptonDrama | Uncertain |
Action | Uncertain |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio Mono
None
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
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.
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!'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.
As is standard on these Olive Films releases of Paramount catalog titles, there are no supplements of any kind on the disc.
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.
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