You know something’s horribly wrong when the video game is more competent in telling a story than the movie. Hitman is like a movie that tries to appeal to the gamers using all the wrong tricks, not unlike the Doom movie.
While it never goes to the extremity that Doom did with the silly first-person camera, there are tons of references to the game that are completely tacky and forced. The laziest being numerous shots from behind the hero, emulating the third person camera of the game. The most asinine being a scene where Agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant) crashes into a hotel room where two kids are playing—surprise—the Hitman video game. The kids stare wide-eyed at how their avatar is now a real person before them. Cool!
Well, no. It just begs not to be taken seriously (despite the script somberly discussing politics and conspiracies).
The script by Skip Woods is riddled with stupidity and convoluted story branches, though it shows an occasional burst of cool every once in a while. Mostly though, their idea of an exciting action scene is a rapid shot of someone firing two machine guns at the same time and random explosions. Pre-launch, director Xavier Gens talked about how the film draws inspiration from John Woo and Asian gangster movies, but Hitman has not a shred of those films’ grace. It looks like they drew inspiration from Smokin’ Aces instead. Not unlike Woods’ Swordfish screenplay—which opened strongly and had several inspired scenes, ultimately overshadowed by a pile of nonsense—Hitman’s story makes as much sense as trying to be discreet with a barcode on your head.
Half of the film is just boring exposition, saying who did this and they did that. Occasionally, faceless soldiers pop up to be 47’s canon fodder, topped off by other barcoded assassins randomly appearing from out of nowhere without any explanation whatsoever to act as boss battles. If this sounds very much like a video game and it’s appropriate for a video game movie, remember that the source material is a stealthy tactical game, far more sophisticated than the shoot-em-up this movie portrays.
The plot involves Agent 47 being hired to kill a Russian president. It turns out to be a set up, so he kidnaps a fake witness and drags her around Eastern Europe. Rather than hiding, escaping, or fighting back, Agent 47 spends the entire movie trying to finish his mission and somehow had things planned all along. We don\'t find out much about 47, or anything about his organization, or even what the hell\'s really going on with the president. So the only thing this movie did well is warming up for a sequel.
(Amidst all this, I dozed off for about five minutes, only to wake up and realize that there’s still no story to follow.)
Interpol agent Mike Whittier (Dougray Scott) is Agent 47’s personal chaser, who has an uncanny ability to sniff out the Hitman despite having never seen him nor have any evidence of his existence. When 47 kills Nigerian thugs with a bomb, Whittier suddenly shows up in Niger insisting to the local police that since there was no motive nor evidence, then it must be his phantom assassin, proving once again that in police work, gut feeling is more reliable than hard proof, at least in the movies. After all, it’s not like anything ever blows up in a volatile third world country?
It’s a poor man’s The Bourne Identity, from the staging of the fight scenes to the similarity of the score to the same scene in a restaurant where the secret super-assassin proves to the girl he has excellent memorization skills. Except this one, the girl keeps trying to sleep with him, and he keeps refusing. That’s the extent of their courtship before he’s suddenly caring for her. Assassins are easy.
Maybe this could be someone’s guilty pleasure, but I can’t imagine why anyone would bother sitting through 100 minutes of dreck when they can get a better experience playing the games. At least that way you care less if the story sucks.
"Hitman" opens November 21, 2007 and is rated R. Action. Directed by Xavier Gens. Written by Skip Woods. Starring Dougray Scott, Michael Offei, Olga Kurylenko, Robert Knepper, Timothy Olyphant, Ulrich Thomsen.
