The doomy, passion-drenched noir Bulletproof Heart (directed by Mark Malone, written by Gordon Melbourne) is the perfect movie for a Valentine's Day hangover. This small-scale but intense movie is set mostly during a single night; it begins with Mick, a top-professional hit man (Anthony LaPaglia), recuperating from his latest successful mission, a job cleaning up the mess left by some wanker, and sneering at the pretty hooker who his contact (Peter Boyle) has routinely sent over as part of their regular arrangement, as if she were a mint on his pillow. Whether he's burned out his soul through too much killing or is just so good at killing because he has no soul, Mick makes a big show of not caring about anything — too big a show to convince you that he's as deep or wounded as he seems to think. (Me thinks the scumbag doth protest too much.) In any case, he's about to reconnect to the world in a big way, at the cost of finding out how much feeling anything can hurt, because he's about to meet Fiona (Mimi Rogers). She's beautiful, sexy, and suffering. She can't walk around the block without causing some poor guy to fall in love with her. She's given up on the world to a degree that Mick can hardly imagine. She is, inevitably, Mick's next target.
Bulletproof Heart (sometimes known under the generic alternate title Killer) was released at the same time as a lot of other indie films with killer protagonists and gangland milieus and was promptly buried, lost in the shuffle. But give or take a little movie-geek affectation, it couldn't be less like the Tarantino knockoffs that, in the mid-'90s, seemed to coat video-rental shelves in a layer of second-hand crud. Proudly gaudy in its emotional impact, it has a grown-up erotic texture that comes from the interaction of characters whose lives have grown stale and who are surprised to find that, with the right person, they can get strike youthful romantic sparks. (It turns out that the killer is the more innocent of the two; he can't believe that what he feels for Fiona doesn't mean anything, or at least, that love isn't enough to save her life.) Like James Tolkin's The Rapture, the movie stands as a tribute to the star powers of Mimi Rogers, an amazingly charismatic actress who has spent too much time brightening up whatever's on Cinemax at two in the morning. And LaPaglia comes through with an touching mixture of confusion and ardor, especially in the very last scene, which you get as a reward for sitting through the final credits. It'll break your heart so it stays that way.
