The Hitman

Plot

Seattle cop Cliff Garret (Chuck Norris) is severely wounded in a drug bust gone bad—shot by his corrupt partner Ronny “Del” Delany (Michael Parks).

Garret dies momentarily in the emergency room, but is revived with a defibrillator. His police supervisor has the hospital conceal his survival, and Garret is given a new identity. Garret becomes hit man Danny Grogan, and he infiltrates the organization of mob boss mafioso Marco Luganni (Al Waxman).

The plan is for Grogan to bring together Luganni and his rival, French Canadian mafioso boss André LaCombe (Marcel Sabourin), so they can both be taken down together. After two years of working the plan, a gang of Iranian drug dealers looking to muscle in on everyone's territories suddenly enter the picture when they make a hit on one of Luganni's teams just as they finished making a hit on a team of LaCombe's money carriers.

Grogan plays all parties against one another while befriending a fatherless boy named Tim Murphy (Salim Grant), who lives in the apartment down the hall and is being bullied by a racist white kid in the neighborhood. Tim's mother works three jobs, so he begins spending time with Grogan. Grogan teaches Tim how to fight after seeing him bullied on the street one day. When Tim stands up to the white kid, he gets the best of him, then watches as the white kid is dragged off by his father and beaten for losing the fight. Grogan walks across the street, punches the father in the nose through a screen door, so hard that it knocks the father to the ground, then Grogan walks away.

Grogan’s past returns to haunt him in the person of Ronny Delany, who is secretly working with Luganni. Delany recognizes Grogan as Garret, and ties Tim to a chair loaded with explosives in a bid to force Grogan to cooperate. Delany sets off the chair bomb, but Grogan is unharmed and Tim survives.

Grogan turns the tables on them all. At a meeting to set terms of an alliance, Delany has Luganni's men kill LaCombe and his men. Then the Iranians and Delany kill Luganni, but Grogan arrives on the scene and kills all of them. In the end, Grogan blows up Delany while tied to a chair hanging outside a window, in retribution for what he did to Tim.

Reception

The film was a box-office success but had mixed reviews from critics. Movie historian Leonard Maltin called the picture "Fairly awful...Although Norris gets to play a heavy for the first time in over a decade, this "stretch" still isn't enough to distinguish the movie from Chuck's other recent cinematic misses...especially since we know all along it's a ruse. Stuntwork remains the film's only redemption." (from Maltin's Movie & Video Guide)