Diary of a Hitman (1991)

Director: Roy London

Cast: Sherilyn Fenn, Sharon Stone, Forest Whitaker

Synopsis: A hitman struggles to carry out his final hit.

The title Diary of a Hitman conjures up images of some lurid Norman Saunders pulp cover; you know the kind of thing – buxom, provocatively dressed women draped over some weathered guy with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and a gun in his hand.   Instead we get cuddly Forest Whitaker (Zulu, Out of the Furnace) struggling to come to terms with who he is and what he does, and having his psychological frailty challenged by his final hit – a cute, slightly pathetic young woman (Sherilyn Fenn) who is supposed to be the crack addict mother of an addict baby (who is also on his kill list), but who turns out to be, well, just cute and slightly pathetic.

Diary of a Hitman is reasonably well made, and very well acted by Whitaker and Fenn, but the dialogue grates; the way that writer Kenneth Pressman alters the way real people talk so that he can deliver whatever it is he wants to say isn’t a reflection of real life; in fact it’s not even an approximation, and is a technique that always comes across as pretentious.

(Reviewed 4th November 2011)