. . . who needs enemies? The focus of THE H!TMAN DIARIES, Charlie Valentine (played by Raymond J. Barry) is supposed to be such a charming mobster that no one realizes that the old cliché, "I kill everything I touch" (which he actually paraphrases at this story's close), literally sums up his life. Charlie is a magic one-trick pony, meaning he never learns from his mistakes, and tries to pull off the same tired old scheme of ripping off mob bagmen time after time. The crews he assembles to help him are more the 1960s equivalent of "F TROOP" than "OCEAN'S ELEVEN" of the Dean Martin era. Charlie's haphazardly sketched out ploys are a perfect match to the bumbling idiots he recruits to carry them out. Charlie's magic touch is that his entire gang always gets rubbed out while he himself makes a clean escape in his mob heist target's most distinctive automobile. To call this nonsense implausible is probably being too charitable. When Charlie recruits his only child (who is obviously on the super-slow side) into his circle of doom in the second half of DIARIES, this flick slips from being merely annoying to becoming a mean-spirited wallow in bathos. I'd hate to be writer\director Jesse V. Johnson's dad.
