Hill, working with co-writer Denis Hamill, is going through the motions as far as the main revenge storyline is concerned.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 7, 2017

Has enough skill and personality going for it to make it worth checking out, even if it doesn't quite live up (or down, depending on your perspective) to its borderline sleazy premise.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Apr 7, 2017

"The Assignment" is an embarrassment all around, a murky, regrettable piece of gutter cinema. Next year's Razzie Awards race starts here.

| Original Score: D- | Apr 7, 2017

The Assignment isn't quite as nutso and passionate as it ought to be. Even the violence, gritty at times, feels a little impersonal and detached. But the film's tawdry precision is compelling by itself.

| Apr 6, 2017

There's howlingly awful and then there's "The Assignment," a thoroughly ridiculous, numbingly slow neo-noir thriller about a low-life hit man forcibly given gender reassignment surgery by a vengeful doctor.

| Apr 6, 2017

This is perhaps the angriest movie Hill - longtime specialist in tough-guy fare such as "The Driver," "Last Man Standing," "Red Heat" and "Bullet to the Head" - has ever made.

| Original Score: 2/4 | Apr 5, 2017

The tricksy structure doesn't have much of a payoff (even though Mr. Hill constructs sequences with deft fluidity). And the role of the surgically altered assassin defeats poor Ms. Rodriguez.

| Apr 5, 2017

Rodriguez absolutely tears it up as a stomping, cussing nuclear core of male swagger, both before and after the surgery.

| Apr 5, 2017

Calling it disappointing would be an understatement.

| Original Score: C | Apr 4, 2017

Reprehensible, yes, but it's also dull and inept. Fans of Walter Hill should treat his latest effort like the kind of car crash from which it's best to avert one's eyes.

| Apr 3, 2017

Walter Hill and Michelle Rodriguez seem to share Frank's confusion over the precise difference between cosmetic and biological reality.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Apr 2, 2017

The Assignment is not so nave as to presume that "moral and political considerations" are irrelevant to its effect, but once you wrap your head around the premise the effect is more or less played out.

| Mar 7, 2017

It's too clunky to be any kind of real provocation.

| Sep 26, 2016

Politics of sex and gender aside, '(re)ASSIGNMENT' is junk.

| Sep 18, 2016

The film's dialogue is entertainingly hard-boiled, and the performances knowing without ever being arch.

| Sep 17, 2016

For the work of a 74-year-old veteran director, the movie feels dispiritingly juvenile, more like the fantasy of a frightened boy than a film-making great.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Sep 14, 2016

Should be sent back for its own experimental surgery.

| Original Score: 2/10 | Sep 12, 2016

A B-movie in which the b stands for bad, a film made with such staggering idiocy that it deserves to be studied by future generations for just how and why it ever got made.

| Original Score: 1/5 | Sep 12, 2016

Despite liberally quoting Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe, the screenplay is just not sharp enough to make the audience feel vindicated about dumbing down.

| Sep 12, 2016

For longtime fans of the filmmaker, this Canadian-made low-budget revenge yarn will be embraced as Hill's most entertaining and, on the terms it sets for itself, accomplished film in some time. It's an instant cult item.

| Sep 12, 2016