In 1997, an FBI agent and master criminal swapped faces and wreaked havoc chasing each other down in John Woo’s deliriously great “Face/Off.” It’s a movie that succeeded because the director and his stars, Nicolas Cage and John Travolta going full throttle nuts, embraced the lunacy of the premise. Now, two decades later, veteran Walter Hill (“The Warriors,” “48 Hours”) has arrived with his own gender tweaked variation on the same idea, with “(Re)Assignment.” But instead of running with the absurdity of the script he co-wrote with Denis Hamill (“Turk 182!,” “Critical Condition”), he plays the story as straight pulp noir, leaving the audience I saw the movie with laughing at the picture, instead of right along with it.
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Playing dual roles, Michelle Rodriguez stars as hitman for hire, Frank Kitchen. He’s good at his job, but as you might expect working in that profession, you’ll eventually make a few enemies, and in Frank’s case, he’s made two in criminal boss Honest Jon (Anthony LaPaglia, trying and failing at using a broad Italian accent) and Dr. Rachel Kay (Sigourney Weaver), a brilliant but disbarred surgeon, running her own black market practice. However, the pair find a way to exact their revenge. Jon kidnaps Frank, delivers him to Rachel, who in turn makes him an unwilling patient on her operating table, proceeding to deliver a unique form retribution: she gives Frank gender reassignment surgery.
This fairly straightforward narrative is conveyed messily by Hill and Hamill, who can’t settle on whose point of view they’re telling the story from. At first, it seems like it’ll be told by Rachel, who is revealed in the film’s opening to be serving time in a mental institution, convicted of murdering her own bodyguards. She’s brought to sit down for a series of state ordered interviews with Dr. Ralph Galen (Tony Shalhoub), where it’s hoped she’ll finally confess to her crimes. But instead, she wants to tell the story of what really happened, and of course, it involves Frank Kitchen. But as Rachel tells her tale, we also get Frank filling in various portions via voiceover, and then later, telling her tale into an iPhone video, in sequences that are shot in black-and-white for no particular reason. None of this would particularly matter if the film had any sense of levity, but everything is played so seriously, it’s mind-boggling no questioned the approach.
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And it’s not just the screenplay that sees Hill miscalculating how he tackles the material, but the production choices are mystifying, and certainly not assisted by a clearly threadbare budget. The movie earnestly wants to establish its California setting, going so far as to provide “Law & Order” style location information throughout the picture. The only problem is that evidence of the film’s Canadian shoot hardly go unnoticed, and it’s clear both the film’s interiors and exteriors were shot everywhere but California. Meanwhile, editor Phil Norden seems to have cut “Re(Assignment)” on iMovie, using crude, simplistic wipes from scene to scene. Hill tries to break this up by inserting graphic novel panels intermittently, but not only do they fail to add anything narratively, the artwork frankly isn’t that good, and these additions only serve to underscore the poor editing to start with.
Given the subject matter, there may be some questions about how delicately or not the film handles its transgender lead character. Fortunately, the film is far too dumb to cause any offense, except perhaps on good taste, but Hill wants it to be clear his film isn’t political, having the speechifying Rachel pontificate at one point about proper art being able to stand on style alone. It’s the director speaking clearly through one of his characters, but if Hill wants us to simply consider “(Re)Assignment” based on its aesthetics, he has clearly overestimated what he has brought to the table.
Certainly, there are flashes of what a better, campier, more self aware version of this film could’ve been. This mostly comes through in Weaver’s performance, which occasionally finds the acidic, blackly comic notes “(Re)Assignment” really needed to be enjoyably lurid dimestore novel trash. And the score by Giorgio Moroder and Raney Shockney manages to impress despite the film it’s been tasked to support. But on the whole, the cast is left adrift, and Rodriguez in particular is given the doubly difficult task of playing two, equally terribly written roles, while her costuming and make up of pre-op Frank is regrettably unconvincing.
Walter Hill’s legacy of pushing the edges of genre conventions made the prospect of “(Re)Assignment,” at least on paper, potentially dangerous. But the filmmaker’s touch is completely lost here, and the only danger the film winds up posing is to the time spent by those who choose to watch it. [D-]
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