I Watch Films: Hit!

Hit!

Billy Dee Williams plays a dapper detective whose daughter dies of a heroin overdose. After beating up the dealer, he realises that he should deal with the higher ups. He recruits a rag-tag team, mostly people who have lost people to heroin, including Richard Pryor, a former Navy underwater warfare specialist. The Feds try to stop them, so he relocates to Canada to train, then they sail to Marseilles* and wipe out nine (?) members of the drug smuggling ring in a variety of tense and exciting action sequences.

It's structured like a heist film. We see the drug ring, fishing drugs out the harbour, delivering them to the laboratory to be processed (via a high fashion salon) and then hidden in bicycles to be imported to the US. Each member of the ring then follows their regular schedule, and everyone in Williams’s team has their way to get rid of them, according to a meticulous plan (that does not quite go right). Except we see it once, then we see it again when they’re being observed, then finally the very long assassination sequence. In fact this is the main problem with the film, everything goes on a bit long**.

This is partly because it doesn’t stop to explain. Which federal agency does Williams work for? He gets a computer printout (from an ex?) for the people he recruits. It’s got criminal records, and how people they were close to died, and military records and… it’s kind of specific and also his way of finding out who to recruit? The feds want to stop his roaring rampage of revenge, but it’s just one guy (his boss?) and two goons in hats and beige raincoats. There’s an older couple who run a diner and they used to do… something? But don’t any more? And now he wants them to be assassins?

The whole thing is slightly unsatisfyingly vague, on almost every point. It’s the 70s! People made slow-paced action films! There’s some good performances that don’t quite fit together, people that feel like stock characters having one scene that’s good and human and real.

There’s a guy who eats McDonalds a lot, and this is a funny characteristic that becomes a clue and later he gets a non-McDonalds burger in Marseille. It’s a funny bit that has been taken over by history! (It turns out the first McDonalds restaurant opened in France in 1972. Marseilles appears to have 15 of them today.)

Watch This: A paranoid, tense revenge thriller, rooted strongly in time and place, with two notable black actors of the period
Don’t Watch This: A long slow movement towards some confused cold-blooded murders

* Specifically they train in an abandoned fishing hamlet in British Columbia. Not all of them sail, but Richard Pryor and the boat do. How exactly the boat sails to Marseilles isn’t specified. The Panama canal would be the quickest route, but at the time (1973) this was controlled by the US and so could probably be stopped. This is only one of a number of interesting logistical and other questions glossed over in the film.

** There are long scenes in French, untranslated, and you don’t really need to understand the dialogue (I was only picking out words and phrases, my French is bad), especially the second time when you know what’s going on and the guy following them comments on it. Still; lots of foreign language.