A US remake has long been mooted but has never happened, but would it be any better than the original 1984 The Hit, Stephen Frears’s second non-TV movie? I doubt the casting could be any better – Terence Stamp as Willie Parker, a lag who squealed years before who’s now been tracked down to Spain by guys paid to bring him in for payback. John Hurt as Braddock, the taciturn leader of the abduction op. Tim Roth as Myron, Braddock’s hotheaded young assistant. And Laura del Sol as Maggie, a sexy young woman caught up in the midst of things.
First the background – Willie ten years before singing like a bird in court. Then the catch-up – Willie now living his best life with a new identity in sun-drenched Spain. Eventually the film proper – Braddock and Myron kidnapping Willie and driving him at gunpoint towards France, where deadly retribution awaits. Through the whole journey Willie behaving as if he’s on a jolly jaunt with some old friends, which irritates the short-fused Myron and perplexes the largely silent Braddock. Once Maggie joins them Willie ramps up his one-man psy-ops campaign, using Maggie as another wedge to drive between his abductors.
Stamp often had the demeanour of a man terribly pleased to have been born so handsome. He puts that to really good effect here in his portrayal of Willie – a magisterial conman and chancer who fancies himself as a bit of an intellectual. Willie reads Hemingway.
This was Roth’s film debut and he’s also perfect as the idiot firecracker Myron, Braddock’s antsy subordinate. Years in the future, in 2012’s The Liability, he’d take on the senior villain role, with Jack O’Connell as the dumb sidekick in a vague rehashing of the Braddock/Myron dynamic here.
1984 was the year of The Terminator, and though this movie had wrapped production before James Cameron started shooting, there is something of its icy blankness in John Hurt’s performance as the shades-wearing tight-lipped Braddock, a better class of thug but a thug all the same.
Laura del Sol doesn’t get much to do but is effective as a quasi-femme fatale whose sexuality increasingly becomes weaponised by Willie in an attempt to tilt the odds in his direction. Almost mockingly, the great Fernando Rey gets even less to do as the cop following a long way behind, arriving late at every crime scene recently vacated by the travelling foursome. Will he ever catch up with them? Will the cop ever utter one audible word? Frears and co-writer Peter Prince are having a laugh with this teasing casting of Rey – surely they’re not going to underuse him so criminally?
Bill Hunter stands out in the film’s hardest-hitting scene, as a no-mark hoodlum whose palpable fear at the sight of Braddock reinforces the idea that this is a very cold, dangerous man.
But all in all it’s a road movie shot through with oblique, amused film noir shot and the threat of death, with Paco de Lucia’s score often shading into a flamenco frenzy when things get fraught. Frears captures old Spain – windmills and parched scenery – as if he were remaking Don Quixote as a pitiless existential comedy.
You could argue with the ending, but really it’s all about the journey rather than the destination. The Hit marks the beginning of Frears’s movie years. The TV movie Walter (a massive career leg-up for Ian McKellen) had put him on the map two years earlier. My Beautiful Laundrette (with Daniel Day-Lewis) followed the year after and two years after that came Prick Up Your Ears (with Gary Oldman). A director who puts his talent at the service of the movie rather than imposing his style on it, Frears is perpetually underrated but he’s at his best here.
The Hit – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
