Walter Hill developed a taste for lurid comic book stories as a child and showed them off in his Tales from the Crypt TV series but not often in his features, until this one. It probably would've been better off as an episode of that.
The concept is outlandish - male hitman takes out brother of mad doctor who then performs a sex change operation on him. I know that sort of idea is problematic to many, especially in this day and age, but I was willing to go with it.
I didn't feel it came off. There's a nod to comic book style with scene transfers done in drawing - but the treatment of the actual scenes isn't particularly stylised. It's just shot like a normal film - maybe it needed to be completely stylised like say Sin City or even Hill's earlier The Warriors. (I remember thinking his The Driver wasn't stylised enough.)
Maybe it was that Michelle Rodriguez doesn't look particularly like a man during her male phase. I guess it was either this or cast a different actor in each part or cast a male who turns into a woman - a male actor mightn't have looked like a woman. The fake penis was lively, though.
I think also there simply isn't enough story for a feature. The lead is established, kills people, is captured and transformed, goes looking for revenge... that's about it. There's one or two little reversals but of little impact - a girl who professes to be into him/her is revealed to be doing it for money; he/she is captured but escapes easily enough. The running time is padded out with talks between Sigourney Weaver and Tony Shalhoub. Maybe this would have worked as a half hour instalment of an anthology.
The cast is good - Rodriguez, Weaver, and Shalhoub all give solid performances, as do Anthony LaPaglia and Caitlin Gerard. For me the best thing about it was the relationship between Gerard and Rodriguez. I felt for a feature the movie needed more of this sort of thing - Rodriguez and her parents, say, or old boss.
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