Assassination movies

[adam]

What are your favorites? I'm particularly, but not necessarily, looking for more realistic ones (i.e. Day of the Jackle - honestly, never seen the whole movie but the book is awesome). Give me some flicks about professional hitmen.

[grady]

There was this film from the 70s with Charleton Heston called Two Minute Warning that was pretty bad and didn't really make much of tension leading up to a sniper popping off people at the Super Bowl in LA.

linkage

[adam]

...um...I was looking for good movies.

[grady]

It's good in a bad way. sort of...I always enjoyed it.

There is The Manchurian Canidate if you've never seen that one, which I assume you might have. I'd recommend both the remake and the original, though I'm probably in the minority in recommending the remake.

Fallen Angels, the film by Wong Kar-Wai, is pretty good too.

And of course, there is always Leon and Le Femme Nikita.

Thats all I can think of at the moment. Enough procrastinating for me at the moment. back to work.

[adam]

I've never seen La Femme Nikita? Is it really good, or campy-good?

[sanakan]

of course: Léon

[GreenPea]

Does Taxi Driver count? >.<

[b.miller]

ASSASSINATION
-The Parallax View is right up your alley.

-The Dead Zone gets a bad rap i think. Too many people laugh AT Walken and don't realize that it's actually a good Cronenberg movie. Also an awesome role for Martin Sheen if you've seen a single episode of The West Wing.

-In the Line of Fire, if you like Wolfgang Petersen and/or Clint Eastwood.

-Also, it's not so much an assassination movie but more of a spy movie.. but it's a pretty realistic take and it's a pretty great movie (and it has an animal in the name a la jackal): Three Days of the Condor

HITMAN
-Collateral
-Grosse Point Blank
-The Killer
-The Matador

Special Mentions
-if you can find it, there's an Italian movie called No Way Out AKA Tony Arzenta, starring Alain Delon (no, not the Kevin Costner movie). That's probably the absolute most badass hitman movie I've seen in years.

-another hard-to-find is this movie starring Yul Brenner called Death Rage. If you're at all a fan of Yul Brenner (Westworld, Magnificent Seven), there ain't much better than seeing him as a cold-hearted ruthless hitman out for revenge.

-The Killers: There's both a 40s film noir and a 70s Don Siegel version of this Hemingway story (both are available through Criterion and both are good). The 70s version in particular though, has Ronald Reagan playing the bad guy, slapping around Angie Dickinson. Plus lee Marvin and Clu Gulagher are the hitmen. I know, right!?

-Le Samourai. Also on criterion DVD. Alain Delon plays a hitman in this one too, but this time it's french. He doesn't say very much though so there's not too many subtitles to read.

[ffolkes]

Originally Posted by b.miller

-The Dead Zone gets a bad rap i think. Too many people laugh AT Walken and don't realize that it's actually a good Cronenberg movie.

why would anyone laugh at walken in dead zone? he's brilliant in that role, oscar nod worthy imo.
walken gave johnny's character a really tragic sense of loneliness instead of just hamming it up in some comic book style performance (which one might expect due to his paranormal "power"... or curse, morelike)

a great movie btw

[the mongoose]

Memento
Elephant (could've been a ten minute movie though)
the Long Kiss Goodnight
the Manchurian Candidate
JFK
the Passion of the Christ
Die Hard (any of them is pretty good)
Leon