The Assignment

In The Assignment, Michelle Rodriguez plays a male hitman who’s forced to undergo surgery to live as a woman. If you’ve heard about the film, it’s likely due to the controversy that’s followed the project since 2015.

Despite having seen legendary genre director Walter Hill’s latest feature at the Toronto International Film Festival back in September, I had completely forgotten that it exists until the first trailer surfaced earlier today. Perhaps this is because the film has now changed titles twice, going from the thoroughly problematic Tomboy to the still pretty problematic (Re)Assignment to the vague, slightly better The Assignment. Or perhaps this is because the movie is bad, bad, bad. Whether it’s the schadenfreude-fueled fun kind of bad or the soul-suckingly evil kind of bad, however, will vary from viewer to viewer.