Running time: 100 minutes
Starring: Timothy Olyphant, Dougray Scott, Olga Kurylenko, Robert Knepper, Ulrich Thomsen
Rating 3 out of 10
Hitman has all the depth and sophistication you would expect for a film based on a video game. Completely lacking in originality, it's as clichéd as it is uninspired. When will Russians stop becoming the obligatory baddies? Hasn't global warming long melted the cold war? As an interactive game, Hitman may be absorbing and exciting. As a film it is neither.
Timothy Olyphant plays Agent 47, the icy killer who went to hitman training school, emerging, along with all his alumni, with a shaved head, an identifying barcode on the back of his neck, a nice suit and a nasty streak. "He's a ghost," describes inspector Whittier (Dougray Scott), the Interpol agent on a mission to track the assassin down. Like most ghosts, 47 is charmless. In its efforts to take itself way too seriously Hitman becomes comically rigid. Olyphant emits a cool assurity and does his best to instill some life into his lifeless character, but even the computer-generated version would wince at some of screenwriter Skip Woods' dialogue.
Video games aren't generally recognized for their narrative qualities, something they share with Hitman which has a spurious plot centered on Agent 47's assassination of the Russian president Mikhail Bellicoff (Ulrich Thomsen). Any attempt to weave a cohesive story fails. The one that remains features Bellicoff's drug-dealing brother Udre (Henry Ian Cusick) and a hooker Nika (Olga Kurylenko) who does her best to raise a pulse in the frigid 47, but quite where it's all going and how it gets there is uncertain.
Director Xavier Gens brings little urgency or flair to a work that is dated both visually and thematically. In a marketplace rich with films about cold-blooded killers (the Coen brothers' infinitely superior No Country For Old Men being just one current example), it's essential to come up with a fresh slant or a memorable character. Hitman lacks both. Near its finale, Whittier enquires of 47, "Knowing how this ends, was it worth it." Were he talking of the film, the answer would be a resounding no.
Kevin Murphy
Timothy Olyphant plays Agent 47, the icy killer who went to hitman training school, emerging, along with all his alumni, with a shaved head, an identifying barcode on the back of his neck, a nice suit and a nasty streak. "He's a ghost," describes inspector Whittier (Dougray Scott), the Interpol agent on a mission to track the assassin down. Like most ghosts, 47 is charmless. In its efforts to take itself way too seriously Hitman becomes comically rigid. Olyphant emits a cool assurity and does his best to instill some life into his lifeless character, but even the computer-generated version would wince at some of screenwriter Skip Woods' dialogue.
Video games aren't generally recognized for their narrative qualities, something they share with Hitman which has a spurious plot centered on Agent 47's assassination of the Russian president Mikhail Bellicoff (Ulrich Thomsen). Any attempt to weave a cohesive story fails. The one that remains features Bellicoff's drug-dealing brother Udre (Henry Ian Cusick) and a hooker Nika (Olga Kurylenko) who does her best to raise a pulse in the frigid 47, but quite where it's all going and how it gets there is uncertain.
Director Xavier Gens brings little urgency or flair to a work that is dated both visually and thematically. In a marketplace rich with films about cold-blooded killers (the Coen brothers' infinitely superior No Country For Old Men being just one current example), it's essential to come up with a fresh slant or a memorable character. Hitman lacks both. Near its finale, Whittier enquires of 47, "Knowing how this ends, was it worth it." Were he talking of the film, the answer would be a resounding no.
Kevin Murphy
