Country: United States
Genre: Action/ Mainstream
Director: J. Lee Thompson
Year: 1984
Rating: 
WORTH A LOOK
The Evil That Men Do is blessed with a strong opening and climax, but everything in between is standard 80s action boilerplate.
When a friend of retired hitman Holland (Charles Bronson) is tortured to death by Dr. Clement Molloch (Joseph Maher), Holland comes out of retirement for one last job.
You see, Molloch AKA The Doctor hires himself out to various governments to terrorize it’s citizens through campaigns of torture and death, all in the name of stabilizing the government.
As Molloch, Joseph Maher has a wonderful introductory scene in which he explains and demonstrates torture methods for a rapt audience of government officials. This scene tells you everything you need to know about The Doctor: he’s erudite, outwardly the epitome of civility but this only masks his true monstrous nature.
In the climax, The Doctor receives his comeuppance in a highly satisfying way. I only wish director J. Lee Thompson had indulged our bloodlust a little more.
Everything in between is merely biding time while we get from point A to point B.
It isn’t really screenwriter David Lee Henry’s fault. All of the defects of the story come from the original novel by R. Lance Hill. Considering that Holland is supposed to be a hotshot assassin, he behaves like a complete fool. The Doctor and his supposedly formidable security detail are also a bunch of buffoons.
For example, The Doctor likes to attend cockfights. For a truly skilled assassin, it would have been childs play to whack The Doctor in public. Instead, Holland takes the wife and daughter of one of The Doctor’s victims to the cockfight, where they can be identified by The Doctor’s security team. Duh. Holland repeatedly puts his friends in unnecessary danger.
Now, if The Doctor and his cronies were really bright, they could have figured out what Holland was up to and who he associated with, even if Holland didn’t essentially announce it to the world. That would have made for a much more interesting movie.
The action is also fairly ho hum. It’s the standard shootouts and car chases, staged without much flair. Again, Holland puts himself and people he cares about in unnecessary jeopardy. In these situations, Holland triumphs not because he’s more clever, creative, and competent but because his enemies are surpassingly stupid and because the script requires it.
Bronson at times seems to be embarrassed by the goings on. At one point, he’s even forced to have a conversation with a fish named Quasimodo (don’t ask).
Really, The Evil That Men Do is mindnumbingly dopey for the most part. It’s too bad because the basic idea of the story is worthy. To it’s credit, the script acknowledges that the United States has historically trained torturers to ply their trade in Latin America. This is fertile material, but not in the hands of a hack like novelist R. Lance Hill. If I were the studio, I would have asked for a page one rewrite.
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