John Domini: Movieola!

So then we’re into the Compound, you see she’s traded one smock for another, the karate uniforms the recruits wear, and she’s good in this outfit too, easy on the eyes and nasty on her feet. Her trainers have reached the point of pulling the criminally insane in off the streets for her, and our girl handles every one of them, she faces off with some Aryan Brotherhood musclehead and she flips him over one shoulder and then freezes him with a slippered foot on his tattooed throat, and then, whatever, split-screen, she kicks the legs out from under some Shaq-sized OG and does a knee drop into his groin, he’s a jelly donut after that. Finally some dry ice in a suit and tie eases into the room, some alpha exec who watches our girl from between the soundproofing baffles, and meanwhile she goes straight at some Hell’s Angels psycho with one of those stares like he was born without eyelids, like he’s four parts reptile, and before we realize what’s happened she blinds him with a flick of her between-bouts talcum powder and then spins him and, hunkering up against his back, isolates one of his kidneys with razor-sharp steel-tipped nails. When the suit steps out from behind the baffles he might allow himself a bit of slow applause, that’s the actor’s prerogative, but in the face this CO or whoever has got to remain the Ice-Man, the Dry-Ice Man, and when he declares our girl is field-ready it’s got to come across without affect, a foregone conclusion, karate doesn’t lie, and what have we just been watching if not one highly trained secret government motherfucker?

Though after that the bossman takes a moment to show off his own chops, finishing the girl’s latest victim when the biker with the lizard lids (and a brain to match) comes out of his paralysis with a roar—no problem, or not for the man with the corner office, not in this firm, and you can barely follow as he whips off his striped tie and uses it a garrote. Don’t mess with Wall Street! Then a moment later this old hand is thoroughly executive again, the Vice President in Charge of Asperse, and the light goes flat while he finds a mirror (maybe a pair of mirrored sunglasses off the big OG) to check the fresh knot in his tie, and with his back to our girl the CO gives her her first assignment. The kind of light we need here, it’s so flat it turns the colors trashy, it’s like for a training film, because for our girl it’s all about going to school, suddenly, it’s learning the hard way, as she hears about an agent breaking bad out there, a troubling case, a former top man who may even have gone rogue…

I mean, up at the Compound, a recruit can’t have a boyfriend, can she? And see why we keep that information under wraps? If we’d sent our girl’s new man back to school with her, then what would be left for the boards? We’d have two moves left, and after that all we could do is make sure we got the gaffer’s name right in the credits, the first move would be “Pomp and Circumstance” and the second “Here Comes the Bride.”

We can’t leave our bottom line lying there, just lying there, not after we’ve gotten this far, and once our girl goes into training, think about it, she’s got to keep her mind on higher things, in fact that’s where the honchos in their suits and ties want her to keep her mind, her and all the other apprentice hitpersons, they want them all the time on task, and then on top of that there’s how our former Miss Lonesome Tonight feels about the honey that got her here in the first place. A great boyfriend requires great sacrifice, a true girlfriend has to be born again, hardening the mind and humiliating the flesh, plus the flesh of a dozen or so bad guys in from the street. It’s all there in the start, the romance, and once that’s in place and the lighting’s working, then anyone watching can make the connection, the things we’ll do just to keep the orgasms up in the stratosphere, up where the water turns to crystal, and anyone can feel what the girl feels when the first man she’s ordered to kill is her man, the bod from the bookstore, the stuff that made guys dream on.

You see how we need the surprise, through this part? We need a twist or two under wraps, unless we’re going to return to Square One, and it’s beautiful the way it works through this part, because what did he know, the boyfriend, the first killer onscreen, what did he know about his girl’s sacrifice? All he has is her smock on the laboratory floor and some hard-to-figure traces in the apparatus, and now we see him shedding tears over those red lights, they go on blinking but it’s just not the same, and he’s even weeping over the keyboard as he uses her credit card to charge a few high-ticket items, identity theft usually flushes out the actual cardholder. But the only phone calls that come in are pitches for debt consolidation, the recorded voices always a few seconds out of, out of, out of sync, and soon enough our man’s that way himself, off-kilter, because whatever his deal is, this part was real for him too, and when he’s up in another warehouse window with the rifle in his hands suddenly he can’t tell the infrared crosshairs from the nearest bar neon, Ladies 2 for 1 , and he’s started to grind fresh green bud into his poison-filtered cigarettes and then tear off the filters and smoke the things himself: a secretly trained high government assassin. The last time he used the condom he almost put it on inside out.

That was probably Management’s mistake, that one, somebody higher up hadn’t thought it through, asking the man to go fuck someone else, but now they’re setting things straight, the Ice Brothers at the top, they’re giving the assignment to their nastiest new graduate, terrific promise even if she is a little old. As for the lighting, at this point we want as much as we can get, too much technically speaking, we want it so you can’t see our girl’s face or the CO’s except when first one and then the other steps, in profile, into the glare of the lamp, one of those blinding white halogens set above the barbed wire somewhere, we want that visual metaphor too, asking, are these faces alike or what?, who’s the killer who’s the lover?, and then right away, bang, while that quandary’s still in your mind’s eye we go straight to black on black, our girl in a commando ninja jumpsuit and ski cap skittering down the mountainside from the Compound’s exit, itself camouflaged, everything on the screen as invisible as her thinking, which by now has hatched a plan to save her guy. She hasn’t spent all this time up here in the Fortress of Kick Ass just to come back down to street level with a very different sort of heart, the heart of a Gila monster, and now she pauses in the dark to pull out some piece of ID, bright white, entirely official, maybe she can click a nail against its edge, and there’s a photo on the card, a familiar face, the sweetheart below. That’s all it takes to make the connection, to make sense of that time she spent chatting up the impressionable young clerk in the Records Office, learning his birthday and his favorite ballclub and his mother’s maiden name, and then that time when the clerk let our girl “hang out” in the office while he ran an errand down to D Level and as soon as his back was turned she snapped on a pair of latex gloves.

We see it all now. Except unfortunately that includes the leathery and unsmiling CO, him too, he’s traded in his suit and tie for the no-see-um PJs, and of course he’s long suspected, our girl could never get black enough to hide from the bossman, so he’s got to clamber down the mountain behind her, ready to undo everything he and his people have done for her, because it’s not just about the girl, it’s also about the target, the agent who’s started to lose it, or to look like he’s losing it. Because in fact the guy might’ve gone rogue. That’s what her CO had been trying to tell this girl up in the Romper Room, it’s the oldest twist in the business, don’t talk to me about a real deal, it’s one minute you look like a stone burnout and the next you’re someone else’s secret assassin, and still trained on this government’s dollar. The very thought has the old-timer muttering to himself, if this bitch lives long enough to make exec she’ll have seen it a thousand times, every day’s the same when you spend them down in the pit, and here we’ll use the moonlight, we’ll catch just that oval around his eyes, the wrinkles avuncular, a frostlike radiation as he stares down the rocky outcroppings and the scree, muttering they all think they’re bulletproof.