The Assassin (1988)

Director: Jon Hess
Writers: Anthony Peckham and Stephen Katz, based on a story by Beth Glazer and Anthony Peckham
Stars: Steve Railsback, Nicholas Guest, Xander Berkeley, Sam Melville, Pamela Seamone, Jorge Luke, Jorge Reynoso and Elpidia Carrillo

Index: Make It a Double.

While The Stunt Man was always going to be Steve Railsback’s first choice for his Double, he had plenty of alternatives for a second, with a set of strong roles in titles like Lifeforce, Turkey Shoot and the TV mini series Helter Skelter, as a well received Charlie Manson, even something outrageous like Alligator II: The Mutation.

Instead, he went for this thriller, a movie so obscure that it isn’t even available on DVD—I had to watch a rip of a laserdisc copy—and the only critic’s review at IMDb is from my friend Jim McLennan at Film Blitz, who looked at it so long ago that we can’t trust its 2003 date.

Jim rated it a D, suggesting it’s “just another forgettable action flick” and, in most regards, he isn’t wrong, because the action isn’t strong, the characters are clichéd and the mystery is transparent—the bad guy isn’t just who we’re expecting it to be but also who we’re hoping it will be because we dislike him from the start. There’s a big explosion that’s wildly gratuitous and the music, which I really dug, makes it feel like a Beverly Hills Cop knockoff, which it isn’t.

To be fair, Railsback does a good job as C.I.A. agent Hank Knight, who’s only getting by with the aid of a daily dash of vodka in his coffee, a traumatic incident from his past in Manila still weighing on him. He’s surely the best actor in the movie, even with people of the calibre of Nicholas Guest and Xander Berkeley, but he’s hardly challenged like he was in The Stunt Man.

Frankly, what makes this film interesting is its setting. Jim praised the political subtext in his review, but that was another era entirely, a point that was either during George W. Bush’s first term or sometime under Bill Clinton. The film used to be listed as a 1990 release, within George H. W. Bush’s presidency, but has been reclassified as 1988, so under Ronald Reagan.

Back then, I presume this was commentary on how the U.S. government worked in other nations through unofficial groups who weren’t necessarily following the law. I’m thinking of the Iran-Contra affair, Operation Condor and a long string of Latin American regime changes.

Right now, it feels like it’s a commentary on MAGA, domestic terrorism and the ideological war Donald Trump’s Republicans are fighting for the soul of the United States. Less than two weeks ago, Vance Boelter shot two Minnesota politicians and their spouses, killing two, for reasons that seem rather similar to those that are professed in this film by the bad guys.

Let me explain. We’re in Mexico City, ahead of a visit by a U.S. senator, James Berkeley, to chair a conference on peace in Latin America. It’s widely seen as a stepping point towards his imminent run for the presidency. Knight has a desk at the U.S. embassy and is naturally part of the security detail assigned to the senator’s safety during this trip. He has a dozen years of experience and he knows his stuff.

However, it went horribly wrong before he was ever brought on board. We know who the assassin is from the outset, because we watch him murder a journalist, Ed O’Neill, during the opening credits. And we see that assassin walk past Knight in Mexico City’s airport before he greets the arriving senator. The bad guys are fully clued in on what route he’ll be taking and they set up an effective ambush. Berkeley does survive, but only through emergency surgery. Knight could have shot the child who threw a grenade under the car, but he froze, likely due to that old incident in Manila, and that means he’s thrown off the detail.

Thus far, Railsback isn’t impressive because Knight isn’t impressive, but that’s setup. He’s also having an affair with his secretary, Elena, while keeping it from his partner/her brother, Roberto, and she loves him but wishes that he could feel again. He’s jaded and lost even as we meet him, before this latest disaster.

However, he starts to come alive after being sidelined, because he knows there has to be a mole in the department and he wants to figure out who it is. His fall and subsequent rise are clichéd but also gritty and believable. There is a distinct lack of Hollywood gloss painted over this script and Railsback plays someone down and out but still highly capable very well.

I liked this setting. The entire movie unfolds in Mexico City and we watch it from both the perspective of the good guys and the bad. The C.I.A. clearly has a mole so the good guys are primarily Hank and Roberto. The assassin isn’t the only bad guy, because he has a team and it has to be said that, while they share the same goal at this point in time, that doesn’t mean a shared ideology or that they all think alike.

That provides surprising diversity to what I presume was a straight to video thriller. We’re in a Latin American country, where prominent characters on both sides are Hispanic. Behind everything that happens hovers a backdrop of peace and the characters do the things they do because they want that to happen or because they don’t. It’s the real MacGuffin.

Normally, the driving force behind thrillers like this is money: the bad guys are so greedy that they’ll do anything for cash. There’s some mention of arms deals here, which is what we might expect, but it turns out to be irrelevant.

The driving force here is ideological and we can see the variety of causes in the make-up of the terrorist group. Not all of them hail from Mexico, for a start. There are Peruvians and a Japanese and the assassin is a mercenary from the American state of Georgia. Eventually, the ringleader is unmasked and, while I won’t tell who he is, he’s a homegrown boy who thinks of himself as a patriot.

Put simply, he believes that Sen. Berkeley is too left wing for the U.S. He might bring peace to Latin America and that would utterly shift the power dynamics of the region. Even as he’s dying, he tells Knight that he hates everything that the good guy stands for and that’s not due to him being a bad guy; it’s due to him being a bad guy who thinks he’s a good guy.

It almost feels like a goof that he isn’t clad in a red hat with “Make America Great Again” emblazoned on it, because what was extreme terrorist activity in 1988 is now mainstream in 2025. In fact, that word is explicitly used here.

This isn’t a great action movie. It’s not even a great drama. However, damn, it’s prescient! The bad guy in a movie almost forty years old is being sold to us as the good guy right now in our present. This film is a warning.