"Bulletproof Heart" Anthony LaPaglia stars as a mob hit man, Peter Boyle as his contractor, Matt Craven as his drooling sidekick, Mimi Rogers as his mark. Very stripped down movie. Only (roughly) eight people have any kind of speaking parts. Only four sets. A noir, of course. You know when you pick up a movie like this, just from looking at the box, even if you couldn't read the blurbs, that it's a noir. He, very unsmiling, has got his black hair slicked back; sultry she is in a low-cut sequined dress; the spotlight is on his big, shiny gun. It is a B movie. One feature that separates B movies from A's is editing. Someone needed to step in and arrest scenes that went more or less like this: "You have to kill her." "I don't want to kill her." "You have to kill her." "I don't want to kill her." And someone needed to snip bits where the movie tells rather than shows. LaPaglia is reduced to verbally explaining that he is an amoral hit man, after the movie has already sufficiently shown that he is an amoral hit man. An A movie would have just shown him being an amoral hit man, and skipped the didactic speech explaining what the viewer has just seen. The direction was thoroughly flatfooted. Director Malone seems to hate three-dimensional space. Actors were placed within it the way figures are placed on ancient altar triptychs. They are in the center of a rectangular frame; they occupy three quarters of the screen; and they are shown full front. Snore. And I never got a sense of any space any character occupied other than that necessary to create the rectangular frame around that rigid composition. Having said all that, I've gotta say, this movie wrecked me. I cried. I was tremendously moved. I kept thinking of Noel Coward's famous line, "Extraordinary how potent cheap music is." There were two hit men, and I identified with – and actually pitied – both of them. LaPaglia has to kill Mimi Rogers. He arrives at her apartment and a sexual game right out of a Strindberg play begins. Who has the power? Who is afraid of whom? Who is killing whom? Who is resurrecting whom? This all sucked me in. It had genuine tension. Neither overplayed, but you could see the shifts on LaPaglia's face, from amoral hit man to possible prey animal to something entirely other. I was a bit put off by Mimi Rogers' acting at first. When she wanted to emote, her eyebrows began to jerk and quiver as if they were caterpillars being directed by an offstage wild animal trainer. But she grew on me. She seduces him. The director did handle the intimate scenes well. If I said I came three times, would that turn this review into something other than an intellectual discussion of a movie? Not knowing the answer to that, I won't say it. La Paglia and Rogers develop fantastic chemistry. It seems to grow, in a real way, out of their peculiar situation. La Paglia is given a few chances to deliver the kind of witty and surprising speeches hit men deliver in gangster film noir. They are surprising, of course, because you have this totally exotic creature, a hit man, speaking about banalities we all share, like the boredom that sometimes comes with doing the same work day after day, and surprising because they offer a chance for identification with such an exotic, condemned creature, and surprising because you begin to identify, to see the world through his eyes, "Oh, yeah, if I look at it that way, being a hit man makes perfect sense!" to see how his world and your world aren't so different. And surprising because you begin to see how his morality could be superior to that of someone who has a more conventionally valorized way of making a living – Mimi Roger's psychiatrist, for example, is shown to be a real sleaze -- and even murderer -- in comparison to LaPaglia. Rogers and La Paglia begin a dialogue on the worth of human life. And, I gotta tell ya, for all the guns and the really good sex, that's what got me. These dialogues and scenes aroused in me confrontations with my own thoughts and feelings about life, death, murder, suicide, love, the human capacity for regeneration, faith, hope, investment, what we expect / need from people we love … what we need / expect from film noir – a very important question !!! I don't wanna give too much away, here. There is a genuinely, darkly funny moment when Mimi Rogers shrugs and says, "Men." You have to see the movie, and you'll know what I mean. This is exactly the kind of movie I think of when I think of people who walk out of movies and drive me crazy by saying something like, "Hey, that was nice. Wanna go get something to eat?" and more or less abort any conversation about the movie. If a date said that to me after this movie, I'd have to be physically restrained. This is the kind of movie I'd have to talk about afterwards. Really, this may sound sacrilegious, but it's the kind of movie that leaves me with a feeling close to reverence – like, after seeing it, I need to inhabit a liminal zone before I segue back into real life.

I first saw this film many years ago when it came out on video. Having just recently bought a copy it proved fascinating to watch it again after so long. The set piece I remembered in most detail was of the two protagonists seated facing each other in an empty warehouse.The emotional charge in the scene is ferocious. The film is a curious work, mixing almost Steve Martin comedy with high gangster genre "Carlito's Way" style drama. I'm not sure if the screenwriter and the director between them completely pull off this trick. Personally I would have preferred it if the comedic element had been dropped. The film concerns an extremely efficient though extremely jaded hit-man called Mick (played by Anthony LaPaglia). He has unemotionally killed so many people that it seems as if violent death and sex, as it were the agony and the ecstasy, for him have merged. (Early in the film he is shown lying semi-naked in bed, and as the prologue to having intercourse he is receiving a somewhat intimate massage from a masseuse/prostitute. As she straddles him he is shown contemplating stabbing her with a pair of scissors.)When he goes to dispatch his latest kill Fiona (Mimi Rogers) only to find that she is positively waiting to be killed he is totally thrown. In her seduction of him he becomes the apparent willing victim, being both tied by the wrists to the bedhead and thrashed across the face; as things climax so to speak he manages to break free. This appears to be his epiphany,the awaking of deeply repressed feelings of love and compassion within him. At this juncture I feel compelled to indicate that in English seventeenth-century love poetry words such as "Kill" and "Come" were interchangeable, and I did wonder if the allusion here was intentional. It seemed so in respect of the ending of the movie. Unfortunately this means that the viewer must plod through all the credits in order to see the denouement. This is ultimately a very sad film as one is left with the impression that Mick is now a completely broken man. He had briefly found love only to lose it again. The only difference being that now he knows exactly what he has lost. As a little aside I must add here that I have never seen anyone either in movies or television drama who cries more convincingly or affectingly than Anthony LaPaglia. The acting of both Mr LaPaglia and Miss Rogers is faultless throughout. The film does have its weaknesses as I have hinted at, but overall is a different and interesting slant on the old gangster/hit-man type story.

It has been a while since I've seen this movie. But I have some recollection of what goes on in it. Basically, a hit-man (Lapaglia) is given his next assignment, a woman(Rogers) who has stolen from the mob. But when they meet he finds that she is expecting him and prepared for the inevitable. She seduces him and he ends up falling for her and so finds it hard to complete the assignment. What follows is (what I think) a crisis of conscience for Lapaglia. Rogers is stunningly seductive in this and seems to relish the sexy role. This is a movie that made me stand up and take notice of Rogers and I would recommend you see it just for her performance. There are too other main carachters in this. The guy who gave the assignment and a bungling idiot of a "friend". But I do not want to give away too much as there is an interesting and major twist near the end involving one of these people. For what I would describe as a psychological drama, the acting is very understated and, considering the title, action seems to be kept to the minimum required. But it is a thinking person's film. For me it was more about a crisis of conscience, because even though he develops feelings for the woman he's supposed to take out, he is from an emotionally detached world and may never have known true love. But somehow she got inside his head. And there is an issue that she may want the inevitable to happen but he has developed a fondness for her. I enjoyed this film. It is thought provoking. My judgement: see it and make up your own mind.

How this sensational first feature failed to become a massive critical hit I am at a loss to understand. With just a few characters and a rudimentary plot, Mark Malone has fashioned a stare into the soul as bleak and uncompromising as anything since Last Tango in Paris. Lapaglia and Mimi Rogers make a heart-stopping duo thrust into a situation so replete with irony that it is almost Shakespearean. And to continue the theatrical reference, Malone uses Brechtian chapter titles to distance the audience and make the whole tragedy bearable. Finally under no circumstances should audiences miss the post-credit sequence (at the end) which perfects a classic circular structure and monumentalises the work. 'Nuf said!