Hitman – Review

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Image courtesy of www.impawards.com

Director :

Xavier Gens

Cast :

Timothy Olyphant ………. Agent 47
Robert Knepper ………. Yuri Marklov
Ulrich Thomsen ………. Mikhail Belicoff

In today’s modern era, it seems that everything old is new again. Remakes and sequels of long dead franchises have come, and are coming, and a film series like the High School Musical is somehow avante garde film-making. So it’s interesting to see the state of affairs for action films. Still some of the best draws on a regular basis, action films have gone back to their established roots in the 80s for new inspiration. And like Hitman, the new wave of action films have all the simplistic rules and dialogue of their predecessors but without any of the fighting spirit.

Based on a videogame series of the same name, Timothy Olyphant steps into the shoes of Agent 47. A hired killer of some repute, Agent 47 has a latest assignment to take care of: Russian president Mkhail Belicoff (Ulrich Thomsen). When an apparent clean kill by 47 turns out otherwise, as Belicoff seemingly appears to have nothing more than a scratch after taking a rifle round through the nasal cavity, Agent 47 is pursued by his own organization as well as police from Interpol and FSB (Russian secret police). Together with a prostitute (Olga Kurylenko), 47 is on the run trying to finish the job.

But the problem is that the film takes us right away into the action without any sort of setup. While in some films it works to our advantage, in Hitman it requires an amount of working knowledge about the video game series to be able to grasp it. Agent 47 is our hero but only by default; he’s not a good man and doesn’t act like one but neither does anyone else in the film as well. It’s more of a matter of being the least evil person available as opposed to being a hero (or even an anti-hero).

While the lack of a setup could be forgiven with top notch action sequences, everything in the film is derivative of something else. Xavier Gens has essentially tried to duplicate sequences from John Woo throughout the film, except without the sort of heart behind them. We could care about Tequila and rooted him on; Agent 47 is just trying to be the last man standing. It’s disappointing because the film’s grand finale is more of a technical exhibition than an emotional clincher. The scenes themselves are packed with action, but Gens seems to want Olyphant to do a weak Chow Yun-Fat impression as opposed to making the character his own. It’s weak and Olyphant doesn’t show the sort of charisma he is capable of.

Hitman follows the Resident Evil series and other video games adapted into films as being remarkably poor in quality. While fans of the game will certainly not be disappointed, everyone else surely will be.

FINAL RATING (ON A SCALE OF 1-5 BUCKETS):