John Boorman and Lee Marvin came together as equal parts in this venture called Point Blank and it’s quite something. You can call it neo-noir, you can call it a revenge story, a crime film, but nothing quite sums up what you end up with.
It’s a brutal, stark, psychedelic trip at times that never falters to any level of convention that we are used to. You have the clip clop of shoes on the concrete. Solemn, self-assured, repeating and ultimately deadly. There’s a man named Walker (Lee Marvin) on a seething rampage. He personally totals a car with the victim inside scared out of his wits. He’s shooting up victims all across kingdom come. Watching, waiting, then acting.
Point Blank is full of repetitive, reverberating sounds and images. Time too is repeating and evolving; fractured shards of the past followed by the present. It does not always line up or add up. Walker’s past is being fed to us through his own memories.
We get to pick up the pieces as he pushes forward on his vendetta. His wife is dead and he is after a man named Mal Reese, who double-crossed him, stole some of his money, and his girl. But the hunt doesn’t end with Reese. That would make too much sense and it would be too easy. Walker keeps going. Keeps hunting until it leads him to the next man and then the next. He gets together with the older sister (Angie Dickinson) of his wife Lynne (Sharon Acker). She is the repetition of Lynne who is now dead, just as each one of these targets is the new Reese.
There’s a point where we must beg the question? What does Walker even want now if all he gets is $93,000? What is going on in this world? Why does it tick in such a way, because to be honest, it doesn’t always add up? Is the Alcatraz we see and then the L.A. landscape true reality or is this a dream that Walker has created so he can act out his revenge? After all, he was shot, right? It might be a long shot, but the plan of Walker in itself is a long shot. He just continues pushing on and the hunt leads him back where he was in a perfect circle.
Now what? Reese is gone. Lynne is gone. Every single middleman is gone. He has a load of money laying out at Alcatraz for him and perhaps Chris is stilling waiting for him. We don’t know. That’s where Point Blank finds its conclusion and it’s just as vague as where we jumped in.
It’s understandable that it has gained a cult status over the years since Lee Marvin is an uber-cool gunman and his journey is hard to figure. His world is a bleak cityscape of 1960s L.A. and S.F. We can never hope to fully understand him or this world either and that’s the beauty of Point Blank. There is a degree of ambiguity that is fascinating. Heck, we don’t even know this man’s first name and yet we invest time in his story. I want to see Point Blink again because it’s not just your typical shoot ’em up action film. It makes you think and it has such a cool aurora and style. It deserves another viewing at some point soon.
4/5 Stars
4 Star Films 