It’s nothing if not familiar: The archetype of the sleek hit man looms large in movie history. Be it a calm professional in a suit, a machine-gun-wielding mob tough, or a slinky secret agent, the role of the hired killer is par for the course in much of crime and action cinema. Yet it remains fascinating psychological and narrative terrain for a variety of directors. In The Killer, David Fincher’s most recent film, starring Michael Fassbender, the hit man is reduced to a dead-eyed corporate shill even as he self-mythologizes about how great he is at his job. And in Richard Linklater’s new charming romantic caper — the aptly titled Hit Man — an enterprising young sociopath (Glen Powell) goes undercover as a hired gun to catch local criminals. Fake mustaches and all, it’s a hilarious and smart deconstruction of the old tough-guy stories movies usually tell about contract killers; it even features a brief montage of other hit-man movies. From ’60s Japan to John Wick, see how many from our list of essential hired-gun movies you can spot in Hit Man.
This Gun for Hire (1942)
Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake starred in a series of stone-cold classic crime thrillers during World War II and just after — a period when shadows grew more jagged and anti-heroes more complex, giving birth to the rise of film noir. Ladd’s character of the Raven was one of the most iconic hit men committed to celluloid, coolly masculine and rather elegant in mien, when prior to that most contract killers depicted by Hollywood were thugs and oafs.
Ladd and Lake are often lesser celebrated these days in favor of those other steamy co-stars of the 1940s, Bogie and Bacall, but the Ladd-and-Lake noirs together are generally darker and sexier. They’re often based vaguely on real cases of L.A. seediness. Co-written by former Chicago crime reporter W.R. Burnett, there’s an air of the genuine to This Gun for Hire and, with the brief discussion of the Raven’s history of childhood abuse and deprivation, a sense of basic criminal psychology, to boot.
Blast of Silence (1961)
A sleek 77-minute New York City ode to the disaffected, the glum, and the criminal on the most wholesome night of the year — Christmas Eve — Allen Baron’s Blast of Silence is a cut above most cult movies of its type and regularly makes lists of the great alternative (or anti-) festive movies. Starring the director himself as a hit man who miserably wanders the twinkling, snow-filled streets, Blast of Silence feels like a pointed rejoinder to the capitalist fervor of American life, when you can even buy a murder on the free market. Its jazzy, deeply misanthropic voice-over about the suckers and idiots of the world feels like a howl of rage from the underside of a prosperous city.
Lady Snowblood (1974)
Decades before La Femme Nikita or the glut of female-assassin films that came in its wake, Japanese cinema had its fair share of women killers for hire. Set in turn-of-the-century Japan, a young woman seeks vengeance for the torture of her imprisoned and murdered family. Meiko Kaji cuts a striking figure, slicing through her enemies with elegantly choreographed bloodshed.
The film is utterly defined by Kaji’s performance, who had already starred in the remarkable, stylish rape-revenge series Female Convict Scorpion; she represented a brand-new kind of female star in an era dominated by yakuza men and masculine samurai epics. From Quentin Tarantino to the women of HBO’s Shogun, her impact was enormous.
The Hit (1984)
This existential and eccentrically British take on the hit-man movie is from Stephen Frears, a man well suited to tackle life on the margins (My Beautiful Laundrette, Dangerous Liaisons). A former gangster who turned witness for the government — played by the powerful Terence Stamp — is being chased down to his luxe Spanish retirement. Hot on his heels is an expert killer (John Hurt) and his more junior apprentice (an early-career Tim Roth; it’s hard to fault this cast). As the three men are forced on a possibly deadly hostage-bearing road trip to Paris, power dynamics, insecurities, and lies pass around among them, undercutting the classic action of the hit-man tale and instead asking vicious questions about human nature under duress.
The Killer (1989)
The Killer may well be the daddy of Hong Kong crime flicks of its era — and that is saying something given what a rich period it was for the so-called “Heroic Bloodshed” movie (films that typically focused on violent-crime plots and the honor system among criminals). The beloved John Woo made his reputation with The Killer, starring Chow Yun-Fat as a Triad contract killer who accidentally blinds a pretty nightclub singer (Sally Yeh) on one of his jobs. He’s drawn further into the undertow of her world as he falls for her. Equally, he is drawn into a classic cop-criminal dynamic with a detective he grows to respect. A near-Shakespearean romance amid its HK shoot-’em-up trappings, with all of Woo’s panache and theatricality in full force, this might be the hit-man film you’d choose to bring in the uninitiated.
The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996)
God bless Shane Black. The action-comedy screenwriter of films like The Last Boy Scout and Lethal Weapon took his pen to this story of an assassin with amnesia to ingenious results. With a brilliantly lopsided framework on the whole hired-gun tale, director Lenny Harlin and Black craft the story of Samantha (Geena Davis), a beatific, ugly-Christmas-sweater-wearing woman of painfully conventional sensibility. Except that she’s none of these things. She’s an expert CIA killer who knows her way around a knife but has no memory of her past. Her idyllic existence is turned upside down by dangerous intrusions from her previous life, and she joins private detective Mitch (Samuel L. Jackson) in an attempt to understand who wants her dead. The pair’s rapid-fire dialogue and odd-couple chemistry give a real sense of fun to the proceedings.
Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)
The Long Kiss Goodnight was not the only dark comedy about an assassin that came out in the ’90s, and along with that film, Grosse Pointe Blank shares the sense of the fish out of water, placing their killers in wholesome American suburbia. In George Armitage’s 1997 film, John Cusack is a perfect Gen-X hit man: quipping, muttering, and slouching through the movie. He’s brilliant in this ironic little romantic story of an L.A. hit man back in his hometown for a high-school reunion, which is soundtracked by offbeat New Wave and ’80s alt-rock. Hit man as hipster started here.
In Bruges (2008)
Martin McDonagh’s pitch-black comedy is still an oddity the likes of which we rarely get (though you could say that about plenty of his films, in fairness). This is the story of two Irish hit men, played unforgettably by the gruff Brendan Gleeson and the animated Colin Farrell, on the lam after the latter accidentally murders a child in a hit gone awry. In the incongruously beautiful medieval city of Bruges, the pair kill time and try not to kill each other.
They tour landmarks while Farrell drags his feet and grapples with suicidal thoughts; they contemplate God and the many Catholic artworks of the city while cracking jokes about suffering and make deeply un-PC remarks about each other’s sexuality. Ultimately, the two go on a journey of friendship, betrayal, existential musing, and mortality, culminating in an oddly poignant conclusion for a film so darkly violent. With a tone of off-kilter, voluble humor you’ll be familiar with if you’ve seen The Banshees of Inisherin, this is a film both markedly of its time in its often problematic language but curiously timeless as a nasty little cult favorite.
John Wick Series (2014–)
A brilliant combination of influences, from ’90s action flicks to John Woo, stuntman turned filmmaker Chad Stahelski effortlessly weaves together cinema lore to make the self-aware beat-’em-up. What began as a modestly budgeted Keanu Reeves revenge flick was spun into a phenomenon, helped by Stahelski’s visual flair and talent for staging a memorable fight sequence, be it at a gas station or Paris landmark. By creating a universe for the John Wick story — a secret cabal of hit men united by a string of special hotels and an international group known as the High Table — Stahelski has made his idea pay dividends over the course of a four-film franchise. When John Wick goes “ex-communicado,” Stahelski can play with every possible movie trope of the hit man, from brusque Russian arms dealers to sexily feline lady agents. The Wick series is a knowingly heightened, brilliantly postmodern experience of the hit-man flick.
The Irishman (2019)
A towering late-career masterpiece from that great chronicler of American masculinity gone rotten, Martin Scorsese, The Irishman is loosely based on a nonfiction book by Charles Brandt, I Heard You Paint Houses, and the life of Mafia hit man Frank Sheeran (Robert De Niro). Sheeran claimed he was the one to have made longtime friend and union leader Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino) “disappear.” Here, Scorsese deglamorizes the mafioso world that he has been accused of romanticizing in his earlier films (see Goodfellas), revealing Sheeran’s life as a slow trudge toward loneliness and death. The typical organized-crime values of omertà and loyalty are shown as expendable within the hard reality of mob life — and ultimately empty in that context. By the time the film closes, with Sheeran & Co. alienated from friends and family alike, the film lays bare the desperate loneliness of the career hit man.
Related
