Hill And Rodriguez Talk Gender-Swapping Action Noir, (RE)ASSIGNMENT
Lee B. Golden III
With TIFF still in full swing, much is also ado with Saban Films’s most recent acquisition – director Walter Hill’s latest movie, (Re)assignment. However, don’t call it that title in front of neither Hill nor lead actress Michelle Rodriguez who leads the film as male assassin who seeks revenge after he’s double crossed by gangsters and given gender-reassignment surgery at the behest of a sinister plastic surgeon, played by actress Sigourney Weaver.
The initial title upon the actress’s signing of the dotted line was Tomboy: A Revenger’s Tale and as you’ll see in the video here or below if you can see the player, Rodriguez discuss the title and their reason for their preference toward it, among other things regarding the film’s intentions as nothing more than an action-genre noir title. Critics are already observing this as per their opinions in reviews now rolling out online with mixed responses: Todd McCarthy at THR calls it “an instant cult classic” while Dennis Harvey at Variety deems the title “crude”. As for TIFF programmer Cameron Bailey, here is how he intricately describes it:
The man who directed The Warriors and The Long Riders, who wrote Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway, who left his mark on Michael Mann, John Woo, and Quentin Tarantino, has just flipped the script. Radically. Strip away the differing narratives, the varied casts, and the fluctuating budgets of Hill’s films over the past 40 years, and his core concern has always been a man’s honour in a violent place. Not this time. This time, Hill’s concern is a man’s place when he’s living in a woman’s body.
The jaw drops once the outrageous audacity of (Re)Assignment’s premise sinks in. The doctor (Sigourney Weaver) is a brilliant but unhinged cosmetic surgeon, first seen straitjacketed in an interrogation room. Calmly, and not without pride, she recounts to her psychiatrist (Tony Shalhoub) how she got there. A lowlife killer named Frank Kitchen killed her brother, so she took her ultimate revenge. She captured him and conducted full gender-reassignment surgery. Now Frank (Michelle Rodriguez) is forced to face the world as a woman. Confused, pissed off, and as macho as ever, she’s out for her own vengeance.
Shot with seemingly effortless style, and making use of a graphic-novel framing device, (Re)Assignment embraces its genre origins. Frank knows her way around a gunfight, and Hill revels in the satisfying precision of her executions. And yet, in the doctor’s cerebral pronouncements on identity and in Frank’s post-surgery evolution, Hill confronts the gender binary on which so much genre cinema is based. As the story propels Frank toward her inevitable showdown with her nemesis and maker, it becomes ever clearer that this is a Walter Hill movie for our times. And a western, probably.
Well, this is certainly a better sell.
Check out the video below at THR and feel feee to glance over at Rodriguez’s IG post just beneath where she expands a bit more about the film. (If the video appears too small, you can always fullscreen it).
