Reviewed by Colin Jacobson (March 24, 2025)
1972 fell smack dab in the middle of the “Blaxploitation” era. For a slice of that particular pie, we go to Hit Man.
Cornell Tackett dies under suspicious circumstances. This leads his former police officer brother Tyrone (Bernie Casey) to come to Los Angeles to investigate.
Inevitably, Tyrone goes down a dirty and complicated path. Tyrone pursues retribution against those behind his brother’s murder.
Hit Man offers an adaptation of Ted Lewis’s 1970 novel Jack Returns Home. That one already saw a big-screen version via a 1971 British Michael Caine flick called Get Carter.
More than 50 years later, the Caine movie remains well-known. Indeed, it enjoyed a good enough reputation to undergo a Sylvester Stallone remake of the same title in 2000.
Apparently the 1971 Carter didn’t receive much distribution in the US. This likely exists as the reason MGM felt they could re-adapt Lewis’s story a year later.
It doesn’t appear that Hit Man did a lot of business, and I can’t bemoan that fate. Tacky and silly, the movie comes across more as a parody of the Blaxploitation genre than an entertaining project.
George Armitage wrote and directed Hit Man. After a flurry of activity in the 1970s, Armitage disappeared from movie screens until he returned with 1990’s Miami Blues, and 1997’s Grosse Pointe Blank wound up as his most famous effort.
I thought Miami and Blank were erratic but decent. However, they look like classics compared to the inept Hit Man.
Who thought it was a good idea to bring in a 30-year-old white dude from Connecticut to create a film about the Black community? Roger Corman’s producer brother Gene, I guess.
This feels like a bad choice, as Hit Man really feels like a young white guy from Connecticut’s attempt to capture “the Black experience”. The movie sports persistently inane dialogue and never offers a sense of reality.
Of course, Hit Man doesn’t aspire to offer a documentary. Nonetheless, Armitage’s absolute inability to comprehend the community and characters becomes a massive issue.
As such, Hit Man plays much more as parody than anything else. And maybe that’s what Armitage wanted, but I never get the sense he intended the film to exist as a spoof.
Even without the silliness on display, Hit Man just fails to coalesce as a movie. It rambles from one scenario to another with no goals other than lots of sex, nudity and violence.
Far be it for me to condemn those threads, but they only work if they serve the story. In this case, the “narrative” feels like it exists just as an excuse for provocative material.
Perversely, that makes the end result much less stimulating. We get so little substance in Hit Man that the sex and blood just become tedious.
I suspect Casey got the lead because the early 1970s was a good time for former football players in Hollywood. Jim Brown had proven himself bankable, and Fred Williamson made the successful leap as well.
Casey eventually turned into a pretty reliable actor, but he offers nothing more than a muscular presence here. While he doesn’t flop as Tyrone, he also fails to add charisma to the role.
Even great performances wouldn’t save Hit Man, though. It offers a poorly made slice of Blaxploitation cheese.
