Point Blank

Directed by John Boorman, Point Blank follows Lee Marvin’s Walker as he embarks on a campaign of revenge after his criminal cohorts leave him for dead in the wake of a lucrative robbery. Filmmaker Boorman, working from a script by Alexander Jacobs, David Newhouse, and Rafe Newhouse, kicks Point Blank off with a weird, excessively avant-garde opening that doesn’t exactly inspire confidence (and, worse, holds the viewer at arm’s length from the material), with the picture, once it progresses past that point, seguing into an unreasonably deliberate midsection that is, at least, punctuated with a handful of admittedly spellbinding interludes (including a fantastic sequence in which Walker aggressively elicits information from a used-car salesman). And although Marvin delivers as solid and uncompromising a performance as one might’ve anticipated, Point Blank‘s hopelessly hit-and-miss midsection essentially renders its positive attributes moot and, when coupled with a disappointingly anticlimactic finish, cements its place as an underwhelming adaptation of a vastly superior novel.

** out of ****