[Lee Marvin’s] Walker was the cinema’s ultimate unsentimental killing machine—chillingly determined, unfettered by pesky human emotions like love, sympathy, or remorse, and unwilling to halt the bloodshed until he had fulfilled his quest. That quest, as Boorman spells out during Point Blank‘s masterful first few moments, involves reclaiming $93,000 that was stolen from him during a heist.

Influenced by the French New Wave’s radical formal innovations, the European ennui of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films, and the genre revisionism of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns, Boorman set out to make a thriller that looked and felt like nothing else before it, using widescreen Panavision cinematography, explosive colors, and a multi-layered soundtrack to re-envision the noir picture as highbrow Euro-art film. Whereas noirs generally boast a shadowy, expressionistic interplay between light and dark, Boorman casts most of his film in brilliant daylight and summery colors. […] And instead of noir’s typically convoluted narratives involving plenty of unnecessary exposition, Boorman’s film is a model of silent visual storytelling that broke new ground in non-linear cinematic narrative construction. -- Nick Schager (Slant)