Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

Allan (Cole Hauser) is having a bad day. His boss gave his promotion to a younger co-worker who stole his ideas. Allan goes home to find his wife sleeping with his best friend. Allan also has a shiner from making a bad bet and not being able to pay up. While guzzling JD at a bar he meets up with Jonas (Cuba Goodling) a Jose Cuervo man. Jonas tells Allan he is a hit man and has recently killed a conservative TV talking head. He asks Allen to make a list of 5 people he would want to have killed, and as his friend, Jonas will do it. Allen plays along, thinking this is good therapy, i.e. to make a list, but not really kill them. When Allen returns from the men's room, Jonas is gone with the list. By the time he gets to work the next day, his boss is dead.After the second person is killed we find out Jonas is terminal and has decided to do some free lance killing. During the movie Cuba talks in broad philosophical terms, while Allan wants to stop the insanity of all the killing. The movie is embarrassingly predictable. I don't recall Goodling having such a lame role. Clearly his acting abilities were wasted as his part was designed for someone who could read lines without having to feel them. Unconvincing is perhaps the word that best describes the movie.

THE HIT LIST is a typical B-movie thriller with solid performances from the leads and an undemanding plot. Cuba Gooding Jr. is cast against type as a weary hitman who tires of his life and goes off the deep end while Cole Hauser is the down-on-his-luck protagonist who makes a fateful mistake one night. The story opens like STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, with strangers meeting in a bar and agreeing to a deathly pact, but it soon turns into something more akin to COLLATERAL. The low budget works against it a bit, but there are some highlights here, particularly the climax which is heavily indebted to THE TERMINATOR's police station massacre.

Having read the logline in the TV guide, I really liked the concept. Cuba Gooding Jr in a leading role got my attention and so, I sat up late to watch what I was expecting to be a good - if not excellent - flick.The first thing noticeable about The Hit List is just how cheap it looks. Honestly, with a film that has Cuba Gooding Jr in a leading role, I was at least expecting something cinema-worthy in the aesthetics department; instead, it looked like it was made on the quick for TV.Unfortunately, the look was a warning sign, as the script easily could have elevated this, had some more effort been put into it. Lazy, would be one word to describe what I was watching, and Cuba's performance fitted in well, with him going through the motions as if he was only on location for a pay cheque, and didn't much care for the end result.And come the ending, it's doubtful you'll be any different, as the sheer lack of effort in just about every aspect of the film - particularly the character development - makes it a perfect bedtime flick (i.e. nothing to get you excited).Still, with the concept and Cuba, this was definitely a missed opportunity, no matter what budget the producers had to work with.

I like movies with Cuba Gooding, Jr, and I liked this one, too. The premise of the movie is that a down-on-his luck man enters a bar and begins drowning his sorrows in glasses of JD. He strikes up a conversation with a mysterious man at the bar (Cuba Gooding Jr) and after a few hours of telling his new friend about all of his woes, Gooding's character offers the man a unique solution: I'll kill five of your enemies for you. Thinking that it is a joke, he scribbles the names of five people on a napkin. Soon afterward the body count begins...I thought it was well-scripted and well-acted. Some scenes were over the top - how could Gooding's aim (with a gun) be so excellent and the cops' aims be so bad, over and over again? The ending was pretty obvious midway through the movie but it was a good thriller anyway.