Ok, so I've been trying to watch 'The Assignment' for a long time now. The trouble is that the film I *want* to watch is the 1977 film of that name directed by Mats Aherns with Christopher Plummer and which Letterboxd keeps telling me is available to watch but isn't; the app seems unable to distinguish between it and the 2016 Walter Hill one with Sigourney Weaver and this one from 1997, directed by Christian Duguay & starring Aiden Quinn. Given that I'd seen Quinn in 'Desperately Seeking Susan' the day before, I figured I'd just watch it -- how bad could another adaptation of the Carlos the Jackal mythos, with Quinn, Donald Sutherland, and Ben Kingsley really be? Can you guess...? Well, it's terrible. The opening sequence features one of the worst matte paintings I've ever seen, which is only made worse by a pull-back through a digital spider web. And things don't improve much from there. Sutherland is alright (kind of), but Kingsley is totally on autopilot, and Quinn, who I like, is pretty much out of his depth in two roles (predator and prey), as a Latino US Navel officer who is supposed to be in the Tom Clancy mold and the based-on-a-real-guy, hard-bitten, hard-lovin', one-man terrorist organization 'the Jackal'; Quinn is really not up to it. The effects are awful, the choreography (not to mention the blocking) is incoherent, a huge chunk of the middle third is a dull training montage-adjacent sequence filmed in a Canadian cemetery (for no good reason), there's some pretty reprehensible stuff going on with most of the female characters, most of it looks like a discount tv movie shot on videotape, and there's nothing to really elevate the proceedings unless *all* you wanna see is Quinn shirtless (and sometimes backless), which he is a lot. So, I guess there's that.

Ok, so I've been trying to watch 'The Assignment' for a long time now. The trouble is that the film I *want* to watch is the 1977 film of that name directed by Mats Aherns with Christopher Plummer and which Letterboxd keeps telling me is available to watch but isn't; the app seems unable to distinguish between it and the 2016 Walter Hill one with Sigourney Weaver and this one from 1997, directed by Christian Duguay & starring Aiden Quinn. Given that I'd seen Quinn in 'Desperately Seeking Susan' the day before, I figured I'd just watch it -- how bad could another adaptation of the Carlos the Jackal mythos, with Quinn, Donald Sutherland, and Ben Kingsley really be? Can you guess...? Well, it's terrible. The opening sequence features one of the worst matte paintings I've ever seen, which is only made worse by a pull-back through a digital spider web. And things don't improve much from there. Sutherland is alright (kind of), but Kingsley is totally on autopilot, and Quinn, who I like, is pretty much out of his depth in two roles (predator and prey), as a Latino US Navel officer who is supposed to be in the Tom Clancy mold and the based-on-a-real-guy, hard-bitten, hard-lovin', one-man terrorist organization 'the Jackal'; Quinn is really not up to it. The effects are awful, the choreography (not to mention the blocking) is incoherent, a huge chunk of the middle third is a dull training montage-adjacent sequence filmed in a Canadian cemetery (for no good reason), there's some pretty reprehensible stuff going on with most of the female characters, most of it looks like a discount tv movie shot on videotape, and there's nothing to really elevate the proceedings unless *all* you wanna see is Quinn shirtless (and sometimes backless), which he is a lot. So, I guess there's that.