The Hit List

Introduction

Allan Campbell (Cole Hauser) has had a bit of a s*** day. Turning up at work with a black eye, he is then passed over for promotion by his boss in favour of the sleazy new guy who may well have stolen his idea. Heading for home after such a great day at work, Allan is then confronted with the fact that his wife is not only sleeping with his best friend, but she wants him to know about it. As you can imagine, this is a day he'd rather forget and so decides to drown his sorrows.

In the pub he chooses, Allan meets mysterious stranger Jonas Arbor (Cuba Gooding Jr) who tells Allan outright that he's too soft and is allowing everyone to walk over him. Arbor then confesses that he is actually a professional hitman and has just shot and killed controversial talk show host Dan O'Bannon. Disbelieving this, Allan decides to play along with a game suggested by Jonas and writes down the names of five people he'd like killed - all of whom have p***ed him off on this specific day.

Sleeping off his hangover in his car, Allan turns up slightly worse for wear the next morning to find that his boss is dead. Stunned, he realises that Jonas wasn't messing around as his dead boss was number 5 on his list and his wife is number one.

And thus begins a desperate race against time to save the woman he loves from the clutches of a rather deranged professional killer...

Overall

Well, this isn't the most original film you'll ever see. This is standard fare for a straight to DVD release but has higher ideas than it can actually pull off. Some of the blurb I've seen for this film compare it to Collateral, but frankly this is nowhere near that standard. There's no real suspense in Campbell being misidentified as the killer with our reluctant hero being kidnapped at the second murder scene quite openly by Jonas, but then he's only along for the ride with Jonas for a short while.

The acting overall isn't that great with Cole Hauser not really that great as the man who kicks off this killing spree and Jonathon Lapaglia is wasted in a secondary role as the cop with not much to do except pick up the pieces once everything is done and dusted. On the other hand, I have to say that I thought Cuba Gooding Jr was excellent in this. His actual motivation was a bit hackneyed and not really explained that well, but he channelled his cold ruthlessness pretty well in what must be his best performance in a while.

The dialogue is not the finest and the script tries to deliver a bit of a surprise, to our hero at least, but it doesn't really work.  It would have been better to leave it as it was rather than tie up all the loose ends with a nice pretty ribbon.

The Hit List is released on the Fight Factory label, part of Sony PHE, and home of a number of straight to DVD releases. If the bog standard action thriller is your bag, then you'll probably like this as long as you don't expect too much quality wise or anything at all original...