Retrato de um Assassino

"Bulletproof Heart" Anthony LaPaglia stars as a mob hit man, Peter Boyle as his contractor, Matt Craven as his drooling sidekick, Mimi Rogers as his mark.

Very stripped down movie. Only (roughly) eight people have any kind of speaking parts. Only four sets.

A noir, of course. You know when you pick up a movie like this, just from looking at the box, even if you couldn't read the blurbs, that it's a noir. He, very unsmiling, has got his black hair slicked back; sultry she is in a low-cut sequined dress; the spotlight is on his big, shiny gun.

It is a B movie. One feature that separates B movies from A's is editing. Someone needed to step in and arrest scenes that went more or less like this: "You have to kill her." "I don't want to kill her." "You have to kill her." "I don't want to kill her."

And someone needed to snip bits where the movie tells rather than shows. LaPaglia is reduced to verbally explaining that he is an amoral hit man, after the movie has already sufficiently shown that he is an amoral hit man. An A movie would have just shown him being an amoral hit man, and skipped the didactic speech explaining what the viewer has just seen.

The direction was thoroughly flatfooted. Director Malone seems to hate three-dimensional space. Actors were placed within it the way figures are placed on ancient altar triptychs. They are in the center of a rectangular frame; they occupy three quarters of the screen; and they are shown full front. Snore. And I never got a sense of any space any character occupied other than that necessary to create the rectangular frame around that rigid composition.

Having said all that, I've gotta say, this movie wrecked me. I cried. I was tremendously moved. I kept thinking of Noel Coward's famous line, "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is." There were two hit men, and I identified with – and actually pitied – both of them.

LaPaglia has to kill Mimi Rogers. He arrives at her apartment and a sexual game right out of a Strindberg play begins. Who has the power? Who is afraid of whom? Who is killing whom? Who is resurrecting whom? This all sucked me in. It had genuine tension. Neither overplayed, but you could see the shifts on LaPaglia's face, from amoral hit man to possible prey animal to something entirely other.

I was a bit put off by Mimi Rogers' acting at first. When she wanted to emote, her eyebrows began to jerk and quiver as if they were caterpillars being directed by an offstage wild animal trainer. But she grew on me.

She seduces him. The director did handle the intimate scenes well. If I said I came three times, would that turn this review into something other than an intellectual discussion of a movie? Not knowing the answer to that, I won't say it.

La Paglia and Rogers develop fantastic chemistry. It seems to grow, in a real way, out of their peculiar situation.

La Paglia is given a few chances to deliver the kind of witty and surprising speeches hit men deliver in gangster film noir. They are surprising, of course, because you have this totally exotic creature, a hit man, speaking about banalities we all share, like the boredom that sometimes comes with doing the same work day after day, and surprising because they offer a chance for identification with such an exotic, condemned creature, and surprising because you begin to identify, to see the world through his eyes, "Oh, yeah, if I look at it that way, being a hit man makes perfect sense!" to see how his world and your world aren't so different.

And surprising because you begin to see how his morality could be superior to that of someone who has a more conventionally valorized way of making a living – Mimi Roger's psychiatrist, for example, is shown to be a real sleaze -- and even murderer -- in comparison to LaPaglia.

Rogers and La Paglia begin a dialogue on the worth of human life. And, I gotta tell ya, for all the guns and the really good sex, that's what got me. These dialogues and scenes aroused in me confrontations with my own thoughts and feelings about life, death, murder, suicide, love, the human capacity for regeneration, faith, hope, investment, what we expect / need from people we love … what we need / expect from film noir – a very important question !!! I don't wanna give too much away, here.

There is a genuinely, darkly funny moment when Mimi Rogers shrugs and says, "Men." You have to see the movie, and you'll know what I mean.

This is exactly the kind of movie I think of when I think of people who walk out of movies and drive me crazy by saying something like, "Hey, that was nice. Wanna go get something to eat?" and more or less abort any conversation about the movie. If a date said that to me after this movie, I'd have to be physically restrained. This is the kind of movie I'd have to talk about afterwards. Really, this may sound sacrilegious, but it's the kind of movie that leaves me with a feeling close to reverence – like, after seeing it, I need to inhabit a liminal zone before I segue back into real life.

Before the Sopranos went on air we have a hired gun, a maffiosi, a killer who doubts the real meaning of it all. In fact he wonders the meaning of meaning. Without being to psychological it is a good thriller with the question 'Will he kill her'. Possibly a little too soon it is obvious whether he will or not but as a whole it is definitely worth watching albeit just for Mimi Rogers who till the end keeps you asking whether she - as an actress - is really terminally ill or just pulling everbody's strings

I've searched for a copy of this movie on DVD in stores, on-line for 10 years and finally located a VHS copy from Amazon.

I truly do NOT understand why this movie isn't listed in Mimi Roger's or Anthony Lapaglia's Wikis as I regard it as their best work. I plan to copy the VHS to DVD ands share it on torrent sites.

No one else seems to give a flip about marketing it on DVD or I'd have ordered it by now.

Never play leapfrog with a Unicorn.

I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy.

There's your ten lines, Bubba.

"The hit must be done tonight. The mark is expecting you, and won't resist." That was the set up, but hardly comes close to what confronts Anthony LaPaglia.

A lot of important crooks want Mimi Rogers dead. Why? No one really says, but we start to understand at her first appearance in this marvelous film: she's assertive, smart, stylish, educated, curious, and, yes, very sexy.

Almost a cast of two - others only serve to set up the characters or the plot - with Matt Craven as superb comic relief, the story slowly exposes the soul of the hit man and the real reason for the hit.

Marvelous work by all in the cast; especially Rogers and LaPaglia.

I saw this fifteen years ago; powerful remembrances made me search for it and watch it again today.

Lapaglia is tremendous as the icy hitman who not only thaws from the heat of passion, but burns to a cinder in the process! Mimi Rogers is good as the object of his obsession. This modern noir film should not be missed. Lapaglia stunning performance runs the gambit of emotion and melts the screen!Don't miss it!