Hit team Max (Myles McLane) and Ruthie (Emerald Robinson) have been dispatched to Los Angeles by their criminal boss (Douglas Macpherson) to kill six people in a single day, returning to Las Vegas in the evening. It’s a tight schedule, and one that they are expected to adhere to, unless they want to be victims seven and eight. That’s all well and good, except Max is as inept an assassin as they come, and when he’s not missing his targets, he’s lasciviously drooling over Ruthie while she does all the dirty work.
Mark Newton’s Hit Team plays the scene loud and over-the-top. This isn’t a gritty criminal drama, it’s a madcap comedy full of sexual innuendo and fart jokes. “Goofy” and “zany” are appropriate adjectives when describing this film. Little happens in this film that isn’t fodder for a joke.
And as such, this is not going to be for everyone, as not every joke is going to hit. Plus, if you’re someone who can’t handle it when actors chew more scenery than is even on screen, this will turn you off, because everything is played big. It’s practically a live-action cartoon about assassins for all the real-world sense it makes.
Which is fine to a certain extent. The truth is that it started to wear out its welcome for me; once you get that it’s going to be little more than the same sense of humor and jokes over and over again, you start to tune out. It’s really not the type of film where you care about any of the characters, or the story, so once the overt entertaining elements cease to work for you, there’s nothing else to fall back on.
As far as the moments of violence in the film, much is handled with digital effects, so gun shots and bullet hits tend to match the over-the-top feel of the rest of the piece; they might look silly in another film, but here they fit right in. As far as cinematography and visual composition goes, the film isn’t terribly creative, but people are in focus, you can follow the action and the like, so it’s good enough.
Hit Team has charm, just not enough to take it all the way. It’s nutty and has moments of humor that really worked for me, but felt repetitious and drawn-out more often than not. Overall, though, it is entertaining; I’ve certainly seen worse when filmmakers try for zany.
This film was submitted for review through our Submission for Review system. If you have a film you’d like us to see, and we aren’t already looking into it on our own, you too can utilize this service.
