“In The Hit, Stephen Frears eschewed car chases, gunfights and sex, [and] blurred the traditional roles of captive and captor, [and] poeticized a story that germinates in baseness, and focused on a hero who finally lets down the audience. In manipulating the tenets of the gangster film, the western, the road movie and even film noir, Frears questioned their validity. And although The Hit is full of incident, it dwells on the internal life rather than the external. This lifts The Hit into a metaphysical realm where bullets have no reach.” — from a Graham Fuller essay, “The Hit: Road to Nowhere,” which is included in the Criterion DVD package.
