Grade (C+)
A solid film adaptation of the popular video-game franchise that seemed to do a lot with its source material, to make for a fun action romp.
Synopsis
An assassin known only as Agent 47 is given a typical job, then finds himself embroiled in a political scandal and on the run from Interpol and accompanied by a woman militants are trying to kill.
My Thoughts
Some people did not like this film adaptation of the video-game franchise but I actually found it very entertaining and much better than I had assumed it would be. It felt like the film took the source material and actually looked at it before creating a script that could make the most out of the inspiration for the entire project. I have played a few of the games growing up and there was an evident connection to them throughout.
I really enjoyed Timothy Olyphant’s interpretation of the bald, red-tie wearing, duel pistol toting character from the games. He gave the role a more humanized feel without sacrificing his onscreen intimidation. From a person that knows the character in the game it was enjoyable to watch Olyphant’s performance as he was more than capable in the action scenes and showed just a tinge of emotion to expand the role.
Dougray Scott was also very good in this film. After recently watching his performance as the antagonist in “Mission: Impossible II” it was fun to see him exert some range in playing a cop chasing the titular character. Olga Kurylenko was okay, she was clearly in the film for visual appeal with a role that felt much like a simple plot device to get the script to go where it wanted. She was not written very well into the story and taking that into account her performance was much better than it could have been.
I thought this story-line did a good job of bringing the character out of the game and into a full-length film but there were some problems that could have hindered it from appealing to more of the masses. The plot was extremely simplistic in its creativity and was just a common action movie script without the gloss of Agent 47 as the theme. But in the end it was still a good, enjoyable action movie. I felt the story confronted Agent 47’s sexuality a little more than needed to simply allow for some nudity at the cost of Kurylenko’s dialogue making her a character you cannot really care about with her flip-floping emotional balance.
“Hitman” was not a perfect film but it was still an enjoyable action story. There were plenty of nicely filmed shootouts that were just on the positive side of being over edited. But you could still see a good amount of what was happening through some nice angles and slow-motion techniques. The sword-play was not so necessary in the train scene and the props looked as fake as the choreography by what can you do. It’s an action movie based on a video-game with an assassin as the lead, so for that aspect this film was a surprisingly entertaining vision of Agent 47, despite from slights veers in the focus of the story-line.