\u201cDusk for a Hitman\u201d is a husk of a great film. Director Raymond St-Jean has a sturdy central character\u2014though the crime drama is based on the real life of Montreal fixer Donald Lavoie, much of it is fictional\u2014made stronger through a deft ability to conjure a grim atmosphere around an actor capable of landing emotional grace notes in a threadbare story. Contract killings are carried out with cold efficiency and continual negotiations of loyalty, and these basic mechanics are enough to breezily pass the time. But the film\u2019s incuriosity of the cutthroat world inhabited by Lavoie and his fractured inner life restricts this foreboding character study, rendering it merely serviceable.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mostly taking place over the course of a year, \u201cDusk for a Hitman\u201d begins in the Fall of 1979. Lavoie (\u00c9ric Bruneau), behind the wheel of his sleek caramel-colored Cadillac, is driving down a country road with a new, nervous partner. His young sidekick was assigned to Lavoie by their boss, Claude Dubois (Beno\u00eet Gouin), after the kid messed up a previous hit. Lavoie is accompanying him to finish the job. \u201cNow that you have to help me, you\u2019ll see it\u2019s easy to kill a man,\u201d Lavoie wryly says. The pair proficiently infiltrate the hideout of their target, shooting him in an outhouse. This is only half the task; in the quickness of a breath, Lavoie executes his partner.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Lavoie is Dubois\u2019 best hired gun. The real-life hitman, in fact, would later admit that he murdered fifteen people for the crime boss, who, with his mob boss brother\u2014the film omits the sibling\u2014ruled Montreal\u2019s underworld. Along with killings, Lavoie also collects debts and is an enforcer. Dubois so trusts him that the kingpin even shows the hitman where to find his buried loot in case someone is dumb enough to take him hostage. Outside of the close bond shared by employer and employee, St-Jean and Martin Girard provide little else about this organization’s inner workings. So, if you\u2019re looking for Henry Hill to give a \u201cGoodfellas\u201d explanation of Lavoie\u2019s background and personal thoughts, you won\u2019t find it in this film. That isn\u2019t necessarily a negative. I\u2019d even say it\u2019s by design: Dubois dispatches rats and failures so quickly there\u2019s no sense in learning their names. But I can\u2019t help but feel more world-building could have happened: What\u2019s Dubois\u2019 territory, and how does his business hum?<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a similar thinness to Lavoie\u2019s family life. His wife Francine (Rose-Marie Perreault) is so basic she might as well be nonexistent. His young daughter, to the best of my knowledge, doesn\u2019t even have a name. Lavoie mostly calls her the kid. Once again, you get the sense this is by design. Not unlike what Martin Scorsese did with Anna Paquin\u2019s character in \u201cThe Irishman.\u201d Lavoie is so consumed by the lifestyle of murder, cocaine, and money\u2014that he barely has the bandwidth or desire to see his family as people worth knowing. But by the second half of the film, when Lavoie\u2019s motivations shift toward protecting his family, there are only two very brief scenes featuring his daughter. It\u2019s a kind of hollowness that, after a while, feels less like a window into the character and more like a severed thread.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u201cDusk for a Hitman\u201d is a husk of a great film. Director Raymond St-Jean has a sturdy central character\u2014though the crime drama is based on the real life of Montreal fixer Donald Lavoie, much of it is fictional\u2014made stronger through a deft ability to conjure a grim atmosphere around an actor capable of landing emotional …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[50,45,37],"class_list":["post-1133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thriller-movies","tag-crime","tag-drama","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1133"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1133\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}