Episode #49 -- Contract Killer / Hitman

(or: “Brett Ratner Will Definitely Design A Custom Rush Hour Themed Full Sleeve Tattoo For You, And Don’t Let Him Tell You Otherwise”)

We’ll just come out and say it right up front— Jet Li’s 1998 comedy/fightin’ movie Hitman (or Contact Killer, depending on which cut of the movie you’re watching) is fine. If that sounds like damning with faint praise, that’s because it kind of is. It’s good for a single watch, as long as you don’t give the plot any sort of critical scrutiny afterwards. Jet Li is a hitman with a heart of gold that gets entangled in a competition between other hitmen to track down the murderer of some rich old gross dirtbag. The film does next to nothing with the idea of hitmen competing against one another, but whatever, it’s fine.

Something that we’re both much more enthusiastic about is Running Man, a fantastic Korean variety show that’s been running for several years. It’s one of our favorite shows, and the fact that it’s held up pretty well over more than four hundred episodes is impressive. Diving into a show with that many episodes is probably a little intimidating, but if you’re looking for a good entry point, Kocowa has about ninety episodes starting from when the two newest permanent cast members joined the show. If you watch those and want more, there are other perhaps not entirely legal methods of seeing the earlier episodes that you can track down with a minimal amount of searching. Of course, we would never advise anyone to do anything that might be illegal

What? how did that animated gif of He-Man get in here? How very strange!

Also, as we discuss at the end of the episode, we’re switching to a more sporadic episode release schedule with this episode. We’ve found over the past fifty-ish episodes that having an arbitrary deadline that we were forcing ourselves to adhere to was starting to make doing this feel like work rather than something fun. We don’t want that, and we’d bet that you probably wouldn’t want to hear something like that either, so we think it’s the best thing to do for everyone involved.