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The Assignment
Director: Walter Hill
Country/Distributor: USA, Saban Films
Opening: April 7
PISTOLS BLAZE AND BODIES PILE UP in The Assignment, but the real triggering here is of a rather different kind. Frank Kitchen (Michelle Rodriguez), laconic hit man of San Francisco, awakens one morning to find his junk missing and his chest bulging with boobs, the victim of a forced sex-change operation at the hands of a demented surgeon taking revenge for the death of her brother. This is the nefarious, androgynous Dr. Rachel Kay, played with the straightest of faces by Sigourney Weaver, whose reputation as a long-standing supporter of gay rights just collapsed under the collective rainbow howl greeting this flamboyantly ... ballsy? movie.
A throwback to pulp cinema before the existence of safe spaces, The Assignment is designed to antagonize, and it will undoubtedly succeed in pissing off two overlapping constituencies: those repelled by the...