#the assignment 2016

I liked the part with the big prosthetic cock.

Holy shit. We may only be ten days into 2024, but this might just be the worst movie I'll see this year. It's difficult to imagine that a group of people got together to spend the time and effort needed to make a feature length film, only to produce this steaming heap of garbage.

When I saw Michelle Rodriguez holding a handgun with the painfully generic title Revenger* slapped onto it, I hardly imagined I was in for a cinematic masterpiece. I was expecting fan service shots of her and her nice strong arms as she shot her way through a generic crime thriller plot. What I got instead was a bizarre, transphobic movie that absolutely should not have been made. 

Frank Kitchen (Michelle Rodriguez with a terrible fake beard) is a mafia hitman or some such, who is kidnapped by a mad surgeon (Sigourney Weaver) that performs impossibly perfect surgery on him to "turn him into a woman" against his will. There's also a half-baked romance that literally doesn't matter to anything.

The first thing he does after waking up like 24 hours after they captured him is remove his bandages to reveal he has the absolutely unmarred, unscarred, unblemished face and body of Michelle Rodriguez, because that's totally how that works. They "explain" this literal magic transformation by stating that the surgeon is just REALLY good.

The second thing he does is take hormone pills because the evil surgeon tells him to, as though he had no choice but to comply, despite being a cisgender man who shows nothing but sadness and anger at having had this done to him.

He even visits a real doctor to ask if he can "go back to being a guy", laments that he is going to "be a chick, except for in [his] head", then complains that the hormones he's still voluntarily taking for absolutely no reason are making him "soft".

It's an absolute clusterfuck of fundamental misunderstanding of gender dysphoria and outdated gender = genitals thinking. It's clear nobody involved in making this actually cared to treat the topic with any tact or respect. I'd hope all these well known actors were in this because they had massive gambling debts to pay off, or maybe they were being blackmailed, but I know better.

The rest of the movie was a generic hitman-kills-the-people-who-betrayed-him plot with an obnoxious flashback framing device and shitty comic book scene transitions, complete with bad whooshing sound effects.

Tony Shalhoub and Sigourney Weaver's scenes were as pointless as they were badly written. The best part was when she stated "It makes me so angry and sad." in a completely monotone, expressionless voice.

Offensively bad, as well as just plain offensive.