A Mission to Kill (1992) Online

This piece, with its fragmentary storyline and muddled attitude, offers no insights for an audience to garner concerning the multi-national Provincial Reconnaissance Teams (PRU) that played a significant role in Southeast Asian military actions, beginning during the 1960s. Development of the PRU, later a fundamental component of the C.I.A. created Phoenix Program, commenced with the formation of Counter Terrorist Teams, memories of which have been given their very own Orwellian hole in which to lie hidden from the probings of chroniclers. The Viet Cong Infrastructure suffered substantial losses at the hands of the PRU, a situation but sketchily touched upon in this low budget action melodrama that concenters upon a single American PRU operative who returns to the United States, part of an imaginary team of survivors that, due to the secrecy of its mission, is wholly ensconced within various institutions for the insane. Following a narrative-opening sequence depicting unimaginative scenes of two United States Army PRU soldiers during combat, the work segues to a supposedly post-war setting, wherein a quondam Pru member, Major Hank Miller (Steve Oliver), is viewed escaping from his Army mental hospital keepers, who are ostensibly not apprised of Miller's potential for using lethal force. A largely nonsensical series of incidents then occurs as Miller visits some of his former civilian life haunts in an attempt to locate an erstwhile lover, played with free use of hysteria by Marcy Bond, while some manner of C.I.A. agent (William Smith), has opaque designs for finding Miller in order to kill him. Smith's halting descriptions of his character's hunt for Miller, droned into a voice recorder to a superior, have a deadening effect upon the film's pace, all while Miller occupies himself by personally detoxifying his former girlfriend (in one day!) from her freshly acquired habit of injecting heroin (described as cocaine by the script). Any degree of thoughtfulness that may have been included within the script is lost through weak direction, in addition to substandard production values, especially in relation to sound quality, including a blaring score that often virtually drowns out dialogue. A DVD version offers no improvements, or extras, and the dead weight of the mentioned disadvantages overtaxes the entire affair. The Phoenix Project and the PRU might well, despite an obligatory lack of documentary evidence, be appropriate fare as subjects for a feature film; certainly, this is a failed effort, with little in it to recommend for viewers.

Mission to kill (as it says in the opening credits) aka The Phoenix Report (as it says at the end of the film) started out as a straight ahead action film with the promise of a story involving Big Bill Smith chasing a crazed marine across America, but instead it seemed to develop into some sort of drama with a real let-down ending.

In Vietnam, a crack, covert team are trained to kill key figures in the Vietcong. We see two marines taking on Charlie in a hail of bullets when one gets killed and the other captured. Flash-forward to (on-screen caption) 1990 (even though someone later refers to it being the eighties) where Major Miller, whom we're led to believe was the guy we saw getting captured as a different actor, is receiving psychiatric treatment in a mental hospital, where due to his occupation he's being kept away from the public.

Miller escapes, and they send Big Bill Smith after him, and then, well, nothing really of note happens for the rest of the film. I'm not making this up. Smith goes around talking into a Dictaphone, doing a bit of PI work and acting menacing, but you've got to believe me when I say that the escaped mental patient doesn't go crazy and start gunning people down, and Smith doesn't turn out to a covert evil government machine or anything. He just looks for the mental patient, the mental patient has a bit of drama with his missus, there's a slight brawl, and the film just kind of ends on a note that'll have you thinking "Why did they bother with all the proceeding guff?"

I reckon the Vietnam footage comes from a different film. A Mission to Kill is kind of quirky in a way (the deaf tramp, the girlfriend's drug addiction) but if there's no action and no pay off, why bother in the first place? Don't ask me - ask Bill Smith - he wrote the story!