MOVIE REVIEW : WEAK ‘ASSASSIN’ NOT EXACTLY A KILLER

Somewhere behind “Hour of the Assassin,” (selected theaters), more than likely, lurks the memory of Fred Zinnemann’s crisp, racily attractive, hard-edged 1973 thriller, “Day of the Jackal.” But it’s a memory grown faint and murky, tinged by ‘80s cynicism, thickened with cliche, all but gutted by a low budget.

Unlike the earlier film--based on Frederick Forsyth’s fictional clockwork tale of an aborted assassination attempt on France’s Gen. Charles de Gaulle--this little B-movie deals with a mythical Latin American country called San Pedro, a mythical democratic president, and a mythical junta attempting to do him in.

The structure, though, is the same. One plot strand follows an assassin (Erik Estrada), in this case a Los Angeleno and son of a martyred leftist leader, whom the junta dupes into becoming their hit man. The other strand follows a CIA agent (Robert Vaughn) who stumbles, rather outlandishly, onto the plot and begins pursuing the deceived assassin.

It’s an interesting idea, and it follows in the general tradition of executive producer Roger Corman: offbeat, leftish low-budget fare, working a few twists on a well-known movie or genre. Unfortunately, like some of Corman’s other Concorde releases, this one, shot abroad, suffers from anemic characterization, hell-for-leather writing, and a mixed bag of seemingly dubbed actors.

Only Vaughn manages reasonably well, and his character--racing frantically around the country, breaking out radical leaders from the local jail, gunning down junta leaders in church--is one of the weirder CIA agents we’ve seen.

The director, Luis Llosa, livens things up periodically with gorgeous scenery, slam-bang car chases, a train-top cliffhanger in the Andes and some picturesque rooftop gun-downs. Llosa’s film is photographed very attractively: shadowy interiors, bright mountains, a havoc of color in the streets.

But “Hour of the Assassin” (MPAA-rated R, for nudity and language) has a pretty weak grip on your sense of reality. Whenever another assassination attempt is being geared up, you hear subversive voices in your head; they sound suspiciously like Howard Cosell’s resonant tones in Woody Allen’s “Bananas”: “El Presidente is Down! It’s ovah! It’s all ovah! I’m going to fight my way through the crowd for a last word with El Presidente. . . .” Cosell and Allen did it all better, not to mention Fred Zinnemann or Frederick Forsyth.