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Charles Bronson gives his finest performance as Holland, a top-echelon hit man lured out of retirement in the Cayman Islands to take out a vicious British political torturer known as "The Doctor". This merciless, well-dressed fiend has been teaching his long-honed trade to generals in South American countries (twenty, to be exact), and as the film opens, we see him slowly electrocute a naked man to death in Guatemala; the man, it turns out, was an American journalist, and also a former friend of Holland's -- at the urging of the slain man's father, Holland opts to avenge his son. But it won't be easy: due to protests from human-rights advocates, the Doctor is pressured to go into hiding; and the American embassy, which has employed his services in the past, plans on getting him to safety. Holland, accompanied by the dead man's widow and child, posing as a vacationing family, slowly but surely starts taking out each of the Doctor's bodyguards in an attempt to smoke him out ("I'm gonna rattle his cage; and when he sticks his neck out I'll nail him."), which leads to a highly satisfying finale at an abandoned silver mine. This being a Charles Bronson star vehicle, the film predictably lacks the moral complexities of R. Lance Hill's fine novel, but the screenplay is adequate as these things go, and Bronson does some spectacular underplaying as Holland: he's vivid and forceful, all right, but he also puts some ironic spin into his interpretation, casually carrying himself as someone so self-assured and good at what does that he needn't go in for a lot of blow-hard, two-fisted macho posturings to get the job done -- when he slugs someone, it's with the gracefulness of a ballerina doing a pirouette. Bronson's simply fascinating to watch. And hurtling everything forth with uncommon narrative velocity is veteran director J. Lee Thompson (Cape Fear), who stages the action sequences with finesse, and wrings maximum suspense from even a scene where a stabbed but still-armed man crawls toward Holland in the narrow confines of a hotel bathroom; he also makes the most of the beautiful shooting locations in and around Mexico without going National Geographic on us. The film is exceedingly violent, yes, and unpleasant for the most part, but it's adult entertainment that's welcomely devoid of a contrived love interest and any obtrusive moralizing (when he's questioned as to his profession, Holland simply answers, "I don't look at it the way you look at it."). It's hard-driving entertainment that plays out like gangbusters and qualifies as a small masterpiece of unbridled excitement. One of 1984's best films.

How about a special-edition DVD for this unheralded classic instead of the bare-bones, barely-adequate DVD that's out now?

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originally posted: 06/03/06 06:07:30
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