Those Filmspotting guys… through their marathons they keep pointing my nose to all those things that I never properly watched. Now through the Hitman Top 5 list they got me onto this one. Have I seen it? Maybe some night on tv in a dubbed version, maybe half an hour from the end, but from opening to end credits? Never. And a great film it is. Slightly off because of its pacing. Not necessarily the editing or the chases, but rather the flow of information in the film. The pre-handheld and pre-electronic communications time allowed you to kill a crook, travel in your car for hundreds of miles, cross a border, check into a hotel, leave the hotel, kill a girl, repaint a car… it is crazy how many things you can do and the police knows exactly what you do last, but they just won’t catch up!
The assassin is not necessarily very cool, he is not Le Samourai, but he is just very ruthless in what he is doing, and seems to have a very British way of being completely emotion-free.
Nice how the chase for the killer and the killer’s preparations are intercut, and how the focus sometimes shifts, so that we for instance seem to lose a little track of our killer towards the end. And then he comes back… and the showdown may be the only scene where I wished they had used some more modern approach, that was a bit quick for my taste… but otherwise a perfect thriller, with some nostalgic moments for us elderly to shed a tear about (drive to a bar to make a phone call from the public phone there… buy Old Spice aftershave to make better use of the nice bottles… have coffee in the lounge after dinner).
thomas4cinema 