HITMAN’S RUN (1999) * ½

Hitman’s Run kicks off with a great opening scene.  The titular hitman, played by the one and only Eric Roberts, refuses to perform a hit.  He then gets into a car chase with his former employers that results in a pretty strong crash stunt.  So far, so good.  Unfortunately, it all goes downhill fast after that. 

Two years later, Eric is in the Witness Protection Program with a new life and a new family.  He cooperates with the Feds to testify against his former bosses when the Mob comes looking for him.  You see, they’ve come into possession of a disc with a list of the names of all the witnesses in the program.  The teenage hacker (Esteban Powell) responsible for obtaining the list winds up in Roberts’ charge, and together they have to race against time to save his girlfriend from the bad guys. 

Hitman’s Run was directed by great Mark L. (Showdown in Little Tokyo) Lester, but it’s far from his best work.  At all times the film feels like the producers had a bunch of unrelated car chase and car crash scenes sitting around the editing room and they decided to edit them together into a feature.  They cobbled together an overly simple (and yet, strangely overly complicated) story to hold everything together, but somehow forgot to make it fun.

While the action is decent, the stuff in between the car chases and shootouts is ho-hum at best, and downright irritating at worst.  Roberts isn’t bad.  His massive mullet is pretty rocking.  The big problem is Powell as the dorky teenage sidekick.  This kid will grate on your nerves something fierce, and the banter with him and Roberts is often insufferable. 

The supporting cast is solid though.  Brent Huff is in a few scenes as a hired gun, and C. Thomas Howell has the thankless job as the Fed helping Roberts.  I also enjoyed seeing Michael D. (The Ice Pirates) Roberts as Howell’s boss, and it was fun spotting perennial Mob movie vet Joe Viterelli as another killer in the Witness Protection Program. 

Although some of the action beats work, the editing throughout the film is choppy.  Some scene transitions look pretty rough, which only adds to the already awkward narrative.  The ending, set aboard a boat, is particularly sloppy.  Not only that, but it seemingly goes on forever, featuring everything from Mexican standoffs to Roberts swinging around on a rope like Tarzan to and a father/son reunion DURING a bomb diffusion scene.  

In the right hands, this might’ve worked.  This sort of thing is usually well within Lester’s wheelhouse, but for whatever reason he kinda dropped the ball on this one.  Because of that, even the most devoted Eric Roberts die-hards are likely to skip Hitman’s Run.