The Assignment Shoots Its Viewers Full Of Boredom

Sometimes seemingly boring events turn out to be lots of fun, which is always a nice surprise. But there's also a chance you're gonna get the reverse situation, wherein something that sounds at least off-the-wall and bizarre turns out to be as tedious as an extended lecture on the various types of paints available at your local Home Depot. I'm afraid to report that The Assignment is very much a clear-cut example of the latter scenario, with a film that drew (understandable) criticism when it was first announced from the LGBTQA community turning out to be such a dull film that it isn't even worth dragging it through the coals on its shortcomings in depicting (in an obviously stylized) gender-reassignment surgery, though I freely admit I say that as cis-gendered man so I should not be the defenitive word on that matter.

Frank Kitchen (Michelle Rodriguez) is an assassin and all around morally flexible guy who kills the brother of Dr. Rachel Jane (Sigourney Weaver) on a routine mission. As revenge, Rachel Jane kidnaps Frank Kitchen and uses her expertise at medical procedures, particularly in the realm of gender-reassignment surgeries, to turn Frank Kitchen into a woman. Once Kitchen awakens after the procedure alone in a hotel room, he makes the discovery that he's been turned into a lady and vows to take revenge against Jane and the various hitman and other gangster figures who double-crossed Kitchen in order to help out Jane in her plan for vengeance.

That sounds like a typical outline for a high-concept revenge thriller but the outright bizarre thing about The Assignment is how it chooses to structure its story. The movie opens with Rachel Jane is an insane asylum about 18 months after Frank Kitchen went on his revenge mission, with a large chunk of the film being comprised of her being interrogated by Dr. Ralph Galen (Tony Shalhoub). Interspliced with these recurring segments are scenes told from Frank's perspective, including another recurring time jump framing device with Frank recording himself detailing his recent turmoil after he's committed his various acts of vengeance against Jane and her cronies.

It's so weird for the movie to just keep jumping around timeline wise as the inherent sight of Jane being incarcerated at an insane asylum where she keeps talking about how Frank Kitchen put her here removes any tension on if Frank will get his revenge or not. Even worse, those recurring scenes of Rachel Jane talking to Ralph Galen are just flat-out boring with the dialogue the two exchange being tedious in its best moments and the brief flashes of personality we get from Jane in these interactions just make her character seem hackneyed (she likes classic literature by Shakespeare and Poe in addition to butchering people in surgeries against their will, for instance). Having scenes between these two make up so much of the runtime of The Assignment proves to be a massive mistake.

Of course, the Frank Castle storyline isn't much more interesting despite Michelle Rodriguez trying to do the best with what little she's been given to work with on a screenwriting level. Her quest for revenge isn't all that interesting on a character level, and worst of all, it doesn't result in any interesting action. What little action does occur in The Assignment is blandly shot and isn't fun at all to watch. For some reason, The Assignment very clearly wants to be less of an action movie and more of a dialogue-heavy contemplative drama on what makes both Frank Castle and Dr. Rachel Jane tick as messed up people. Since both characters are so poorly realized though, all of the ceaseless chatter just becomes monotonous right from the get-go.

The more weighty aspirations of the film are melded with some more artistic visual choices, like a recurring penchant for shooting scenes in black-and-white, while overly stylized scene and shot transitions (one of which include having certain live-action shots slowly transform into comic book style hand-drawn animation renderings of that same shot) seem like they would be more at home in some kind of over-the-top action movie. The only thing that really stands out in the incredibly forgettable Walter Hill thriller The Assignment is a surprisingly good bit of acting from Caitlin Gerard in her big but brief emotional scene and the presence of a pit bull!!! The pit bull totally steals the show in the one fun moment in the entire movie wherein he places his paw atop a fateful handshake between two humans (I've placed a photo of said moment below). Otherwise, The Assignment is just anemic action fare without any fun or interesting characters to its name. I've been wanting Michelle Rodriguez to get her own action movie vehicle for ages now but this is most certainly not what I had in mind when I said she needed an action movie to call her own.

The lone moment of awesomeness in an otherwise snooze of a movie; a pitbull
engaging in a paw-shake!