Hitman Review

Published by Jeff Leins on December 3, 2007

Hitman is simply a poor gun-battle action movie with no memorable fight scenes and a miscast lead. Fans of the video game won’t even find the same tension or adrenaline surges you get while hunting an objective. And if there’s nothing for the young male audience then there’s certainly nothing there for other demographics.

The game itself doesn’t even lend much in the way of a story. You simply run around and try to assassinate people with various weapons of the trade. How a bald man with a bar code tattooed on the back of his head suddenly became a chameleon doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. But here it is. A Hitman movie. Unfortunately.

I wasn’t sure I bought Timothy Olyphant as Agent 47 and was hoping the film would convince me. It didn’t. You can’t take a popular, proven actor and shave his head expecting that to magically complete the transformation.

It seems his acceptance of the role might have been as business-like as the character. Though I’m not sure how playing an emotionless character serves to further his career anymore than adding numbers to his bank account. With little to work with here, Olyphant delivers the majority of his lines through clenched teeth when he’s not glowering at nothing in particular. He’s surrounded by inexperience and bad acting, while reciting lines off of a truncated script. Anything remotely interesting or fun has been not-so-expertly sliced from the screenplay, leaving a mess and another bad video game adaptation.

One that starts out by showing a bad montage of kids inexplicably being branded and trained in combat. Not much of a backstory for the character and not much of a setup for the movie.

Instead, we get our first good look at our cold-blooded protagonist turning down women and liquor. What kind of hitman is this? Then he goes up stairs and gets in the shower, before sitting in front of his laptop in a “wifebeater” shirt. Sorry, but I expected a hero known for killing in a suit and tie to be a little more slick, and not changing into the favorite attire of Jimmy Joe on “Cops.”

Then it skips along in a series of disjointed scenes that don’t serve to build on anything or even attempt to start a story arc. Just a seizure of quick cuts where fluidity should prevail. We should see Agent 47 executing missions to perfection, and calmly disappearing into the shadows, not Lee Harvey Oswald scrambling from the crime scene.

The director has no idea how to contrast the calculated moves of the hitman with the chaos that he creates in public. Instead, it’s just like all the other action movies with a gun-toting murderer, only without names or a decent premise. The editing is atrocious, flashing quickly or lurching into slow motion without rhyme or reason. This is the kind of thing MTV could get behind, if only there was a catchy tune to replace the cringe worthy dialogue.

One thing that bugged me is when Agent 47 crashed into a room and the kids were playing Hitman on TV. Why include that? To be funny? To be ironic? To take everyone right out of the movie? Not that there was much to get into, but what an ill-advised decision to stop everything and go, “Hey, look. The game. Remember?”

Sprinkle in a typical, but otherwise yawn-inducing jurisdiction war between Interpol and the Russian secret police, and you’ve got yourself some cliches to round out the negatives.

Not much positive to say about the film. There was nudity, but from his prostitute sidekick that should’ve caught one between the eyes just like everyone else. Instead, Agent 47 has to drag her around trying to solve a mystery that no one really cares about.

I’m not sure how this adaptation could have been worse, other than maybe a child hostage instead. Or civil war muskets instead of silenced pistols. William Shatner as Agent 47. Hitman says, “You just got served” every time he shoots someone…

Ok, I guess it could’ve been worse. But not by much.

1.5 out of 5.