We’ll give this much to the trailer for Walter Hill’s pulp item The Assignment: It succeeds in making a movie that’s merely not good look like a train wreck. Previously titled (Re)Assignment (and Tomboy before that), the film stars Michelle Rodriguez as a hitman who is given a forced sex reassignment by a vindictive plastic surgeon (Sigourney Weaver). And you’ll just have to trust us when we tell you that this Canadian trailer obscures both the deranged scenery-chewing of Weaver’s performance and the fact that Hill does next to nothing with the premise—which, oddly, is what gives the movie anything like a sense of integrity. It is, however, exactly as sleazy as promised. Heck, it even features a score by Giorgio Moroder to go with all that nudity.
We saw The Assignment at last year’s TIFF; at present, no US release date is set. Hill, the writer-director who brought us The Driver and The Warriors, was one of the great American genre directors of the 1970s and ’80s, and made some pretty good movies in the ’90s, too. He can do better than this.