"Hit!" tells the story of an FBI agent who goes rogue to avenge the death of his sister from a drug overdose. The revenge takes him to France with a rag-tag bunch of similarly affected characters - the elderly parents of a dead addict, a call-girl with the heroin habit, a dockyard worker whose wife was killed by a junkie, etc. The agent spirits them all to Canada, narrowly evading the grasp of FBI, which is (somehow) trying to kill him rather than arresting him. From there, following an apparently impromptu training routine, the death squad travels to Marseille to pull off the hit on a group of French businessmen (and perverts) who make their money on heroin peddling. Furie's film begins with a sequence that juxtaposes events in Marseille - where the drug boss fishes out a drug shipment outside the harbor - and the US - where a young Black guy drives a Stingray Corvette to pick up his girlfriend and then get some heroin to have a ball. The cuts are incongruous - when the Stingray first appears on the screen, it is completely unclear what it's doing there; when we're back in France, it's even more puzzling why. This lasts a few good minutes, until the girl (apparently) OD's. When Billy Dee Williams' character appears on the screen, the French sequences take a back seat, which makes it easier to understand their import, but the pace declines so rapidly you can find yourself yawning before the 20th minute. Williams' quest to locate potential co-conspirators begins in good style, but then he herds them onto a dilapidated boat anchored across the lake from Canada and goes after another name, which results in a 20-minute sidenote that fails to push the movie any further. Canada being the peace-loving country that it is, even the escape up north doesn't help. When the group eventually reach Marseille, even the hit itself takes a quite long while to gain momentum, eventually providing the only reasonably good 10 minutes of the entire 2-hour film. Such a waste of time... That said, there are positives. Williams' character enlists the help of a hot-headed 50-ish policeman who reconnoiters the Marseille circles, effectively doing *all* of the FBI guy's dirty work for him. Him, Richard Pryor's sharp-tongued dockworker, and the druggie girl are pretty much the only characters in the film that invite any interest, and Furie indicates that he sees their value. Scenes with the other characters, sadly including Williams', are routinely off-pace. Furthermore, the story itself suffers from lack of consideration. FBI may have been (and may still be) a rather unpleasant entity, but the film depicts the organization as pretty much the equivalent of a drug ring, with the head acting like a drug lord, and his subordinates resembling mob hitmen. Williams himself seems more like a contract killer than an agent - which suggests that this aspect of the main protagonist's backstory was only resolved at the very last stage of script-writing. Finally, the film does not really belong in the "blaxploitation" category - while it does share the premise with the far superior "Gordon's War," it features only a limited number of Black actors and doesn't address the specific cleavages of the Black community, including life in the ghetto. The dead girl and Richard Pryor aside, it's a fairly regular White Hollywood flick, only poorly conceived, executed, and edited.

***SPOILERS*** Overlong and somewhat boring movie that takes forever to get to the point or "Hit" about this disgruntled US Government Agent Nick Allen who's out to terminate the Marselle Franch drug cartel who's responsible for his 15 year old daughter Jennie's drug overdose. That's when her drug dealing boyfriend slipped her a sample to snort on while driving her home from school. Taking a 30 day forced vacation Nick assembled a group of former victims of drug abuse and whipped them into shape in his plan to wipe out the cartel that was, as it seemed, to be protected by the both local Marselle police as well as the US Government agency that Nick works for.The movie go one for some two hours in Nick planning his "Hit" on the Marselle cartel at this out of the way and deserted fishing village outside Seattle Washington before he and the team embarks to France to get the job or "Hit" done. At one point Nick's squad of hit-men and women backed off on his plan feeling that it was too dangerous and mindless to carry out. That's until he had one of his team members former or recovering junkie Sherry Nielson who was hooked on heroin go cold turkey, by not giving her her daily fix, and about to kick off. That in preventing Sherrie from dying before their eyes had Nick's team change their minds and go along with him to sail, with him at the wheel, to Marselle and massacre the French cartel as well as it's enablers!****SPOILERS**** It's when the "Hit" finally came into execution in the last 15 or so minutes of the movie we the audience finely got its monies worth with Nick & Co. doing their thing on the bad guys all over the city in a number of bloody rub-outs that shook up the local police who for years were unable, because of the law as well as pay-offs by the cartel, to get the job or "Hit" job done.. As for Nick he was given immunity from prosecution by his boss by keeping his mouth shut, in that he was a Government Agent, in not embarrassing the local police authorities in him or the US Government, who really had nothing at all to do with it, having done the job that they were unable or not willing to do.

Nice little flick that is long in run time and continues to interest you well into the ending. Using "The French Connection" (1971) as its role model, it's about a federal agent (played by wonderful actor Billy Dee Williams) who assembles a team of regulars to knock off some French heroin dealers. Yeah, it's absurd, but actually it is a slick little film that kept me interested all the way through.Billy Dee Williams does a fine job, as he did in The Empire Strikes Back (1980). Keep on trucking brother.Oh yeah, Keep on trucking brother!Nice little flick.

...and in fact, Hit! is an ambitious mixture of action and character study. At 134 minutes, one might suspect the director of overweening pride, but in fact there's little in the way of flab here. Billy Dee Williams proves that he should have been a major star and Richard Pryor is, as always, brilliant. Add a terrific supporting cast (Warren Kemmerling, Paul 'They Came From Within' Hampton, Sid Munson), a host of slimy French drug dealers, and a heaping dollop of revenge for a thoroughly satisfying blast of 70s-style crime dramatics.