Hitman

It would seem that video game movies are starting to become a sort of event for fans only. Last year's Silent Hill movie was criticized for being hard to follow unless you had actually played the games. Now we have Hitman, which is so incoherent in its narrative, I don't even know if playing the game would have helped me understand what was going on. The movie is kind of like The Bourne Identity, only with a much less likable lead character and a story we can't care much about. The movie throws presidential assassinations, conspiracies, women in peril, and a bald guy with a bar code tattooed on the back of his head, but can't think of a way to throw these things together into a story that holds our interest. Maybe the film's writer, Skip Woods (Swordfish), had his mind on other things when throwing together the screenplay.

The precious little amount of background info we receive is that there is some secret organization called The Agency that takes unwanted children, trains them to be soulless killers, then shaves them bald and brands them with a tattoo of a bar code on the back of their head. You'd think that alone would make these people easy to spot, let alone identify, but the movie keeps on insisting that these trained killers are like ghosts and have never been caught. The Agency apparently has ties to the church, but the movie keeps this to itself, and no mention of religion is ever brought up in the film other than using "Ave Maria" during the opening credits, and someone stumbling upon a small cross with writing upon it at one point. The film follows the exploits of an assassin who goes by the name of Agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant). With his shaved head, distinctive tattoo, and blazing red tie that he usually always wears, he certainly seems to stand out in a crowd, and makes me wonder why no one has caught him yet. Yet, he's being pursued by Interpol Agent Mike Whittier (Dougray Scott), who has devoted his life to catching the guy.

Early on in the film, Agent 47 is charged with the task to kill Russia's new President, Mikhail Belicoff (Ulrich Thomsen). He blows the guy's brains out in the middle of a public media event, only to later be watching TV, and discover the Russian President being alive and well. (And yet, the reporters do not even question how the President could still be alive, not even the reporters who were shown getting sprayed with the President's bloody chunks during the earlier assassination attempt.) 47 knows he's been set up by his own organization but, for reasons he decides to keep to himself, he decides to take another job from them, this time being assigned to kill Belicoff's abused mistress and prostitute, Nika (Olga Kurylenko). 47 does not kill her, realizing she may be able to help him find out who set him up within his organization. Once again, how or why is a mystery, but he shoves her in his car trunk anyway. Despite the fact that the guy is frequently verbally and physically abusive to her, Nika finds herself falling for 47. Our hero, meanwhile, kills a lot of people and doesn't really say a whole heck of a lot. Then again, neither does anybody else, who seem just as lost as the audience in trying to figure out what's going on. When they do say something, it is usually something trite and meaningless, such as how Nika suddenly tells 47 out of the blue, "When I was a child, my father used to raise grapes", the comment not really going anywhere after that. Yeah, thanks for that.

Hitman is a movie that tries so desperately hard to be cool, but the strange thing is, it doesn't even seem to know how to be. Not even the film's numerous "stylish" gun battles are all that stylish or interesting to watch in the first place. The only action sequence in the movie that even comes close to being a highlight is when Agent 47 must battle three other fellow Agents, but even this isn't nearly as exciting as it should be. The movie drowns itself in plot, throws multiple twists and double crosses our way, and piles on the characters to the point that we need a chart to keep them all straight and what role in the story they play. The problem is, the movie is so consumed with moving ahead that it forgets to give us any reason to care. The characters are completely shallow and non-existent to the point that they almost are comical. Agent 47 is such a lifeless and dull lead, it's impossible to want us to see him succeed in his mission (whatever it may be). I know the guy is supposed to be a soulless killer, but does that mean he has to have no personality whatsoever? Nothing that comes out his mouth sounds cool or interesting, and he's mainly required to just give a blank stare to everything that happens around him. I guess this is supposed to make him come across as a badass, but it unintentionally made him come across like there was nothing going on upstairs. French director Xavier Gens seems only concerned with keeping the action moving, little realizing that the action has to be interesting in the first place.

Since everyone is forced to play emotionless robots, the entire cast comes up short. In the lead role, Timothy Olyphant lacks any ounce of character or even personality. This is most likely intentional, but the way Olyphant underplays everything, it just comes across as one of the big "nothing" performances of the year. This is the second big disappointment from Olyphant this year, as I was also not a fan of his handling as the lead villain in last summer's Live Free or Die Hard. I'm hoping someone can finally find a role that suits him. As love interest Nika, Olga Kurylenko is nice to look at, but not much more than that. She at least brings some amount of sympathy to her character, but she's forced to act like such an idiot for most of the film it's hard to root for her. Tell me girls, would you fall for a guy who stuffed you in a trunk most of the time and drugged you when you tried to have sex with them? I'm sort of glad the movie didn't go further with their relationship, as I'd hate to see what their first date would include. Dougray Scott is equally bland, as his single-minded character is given nothing to do but chase around the world after Agent 47, seldom stopping to give us a reason to be attached to him.
Like most failed video game adaptations, Hitman is a jumbled mess of stylish cool and pleasing the hardcore fanbase. Based on some comments I've read from fans of the video games on various message boards, the movie even failed to fulfill that. Why the Fox Studio decided this could be a big holiday weekend release baffles me. There is nothing here that is done particularly well, nor is there anything especially interesting or special about it. I won't go so far as to say the movie is worthless, as there are a couple scenes that look good and have been shot well. What little bit of style the movie does have does not make up for the complete lack of interesting substance found within Hitman.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

3 comments