I’ve been on a mission to see as many obscure and forgotten films as possible, which is why, last night — via Movieplex OnDemand —  I ended up watching a 1991 film called Diary of a Hitman.

In Diary of a Hitman, Forest Whitaker plays Dekker, a professional killer.  Despite the film’s title, Dekker does not keep a diary.  What he does do is talk.  A lot.  The film is framed by scenes of him telling his story to somebody on the phone.  (I was never quite sure who he was supposed to be talking to.)  Over the course of the film, he talks to a psychiatrist.  He talks to his agent (Seymour Cassel).  He talks to a dominatrix.  He talks to a corrupt police officer (James Belushi).  He talks to a born-again Christian (Lewis Smith) who hires Dekker to kill his wife and a baby that he may or may not be the father of.  Eventually, he ends up talking to Jain (Sherilyn Fenn), the woman that he’s been hired to kill.  He even has a very brief conversation with Jain’s sister, Kiki (who is played, in a shrill cameo appearance, by Sharon Stone).

With all of the constant talking, it’s not surprising to discover that Diary of a Hitman was based on a stage play.  That’s especially obvious during the film’s second act, which almost entirely takes place inside of Jain’s apartment and basically consists of Fenn and Whitaker delivering dramatic monologues about life and death.  Director Roy London was an acting teacher (among his students were Sharon Stone and Sherilyn Fenn) and it’s perhaps not surprising that he never found a way to make such obviously stage-bound material feel cinematic.  Instead, London directed the film as if he was filming an acting exercise.  Just consider the scene where Kiki drops by the apartment unannounced.  While watching this scene, I kept having flashbacks to high school theater.  I could literally hear one of my old teachers saying, “Okay, for this scene, your motivation is to get her to leave the apartment and your motivation is to stay in the apartment no matter what.  And…go!”

That said, Diary of a Hitman is not a total waste of time.  Playing the agoraphobic Jain, Sherilyn Fenn (who can be seen playing a far more villainous character in this year’s Raze) gives a sympathetic performance, even managing to redeem a potentially distasteful scene where she attempts to seduce Decker.  (I’ve included that scene at the bottom of the review, mostly because — along with Sharon Stone’s cameo — it’s the only scene from Diary Of A Hitman that’s currently available on YouTube.)

And then there’s Forest Whitaker.  It’s hard to say whether Whitaker gives a good performance here or not, largely because the character of Decker makes little sense to begin with and he’s required to have a massive change of heart that seems to come out of nowhere.  (Whitaker has made a credible killer in several other films, just not this one.)  However, what Whitaker lacks in credibility, he makes up for in eccentricity.  In the role of Decker, Forest Whitaker gives one of the oddest performances that I’ve ever seen.  Delivering the majority of his dialogue in an occasionally incomprehensible rasp and flashing a wide smile at the most inappropriate of moments, Forest Whitaker is a force of misdirected nature in this film.  Again, it’s hard to say whether Whitaker actually gives a good performance here but he does make Diary of a Hitman worth seeing.