If there was any video game I had high hopes for a good movie based off it, that game would probably have been Hitman. Honestly, I never thought the game was really movie worthy until I saw the first trailer. I was actually impressed with what I initially saw. The actor looked like 47, there was violence and lots of what appeared to be assassinations taking place. Hell, they even had the title theme from the game and it sounded great.
Upon viewing the film for myself, I was in awe at how much the makers of said movie screw things up. I'm shocked to say that I don't think the makers of Hitman got anything right when it came to relating the film and the game together. I don't even think I need to review the film at this point because i'm sure everyone knows where this is going. Anyway, let's dive into this pool of shit that critics like to call "Hitman".
Because this is a movie review, i'm going to stick to a few bolded points instead of talking about certain aspects of the film. I'm just going to be talking about the film itself and nothing more...
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That's not Agent 47!
First and foremost, the person depicted in Hitman is not the character fans of the video game have to come to know. The person in Hitman is not Agent 47. The Agent 47 I know is a bald, killer clone. More importantly, he's emotionless, meaning he is to be without emotion.
Agent 47 isn't the best choice for a movie character, basically because he is an emotionless bastard and wouldn't be too easy to portray on screen. The actor playing 47 would have to be some sort of emotionless robot to even think of doing 47 justice on the big screen. Sadly, Timothy Olyphant is NOT an emotionless robot. Olyphant absolutely butchered the character of Agent 47. He hadn't even spoke a single word and he already killed the character. Why? It's because Olyphant isn't bald. Through out the movie, I could always tell he had shaved his head. Agent 47 is the 47th bald clone of another, not some guy who shaved his head to give the ILLUSION of baldness.
Seriously, the makers of the movie couldn't cast a bald actor? I'm sure there are plenty of them out there to choose from. I'm not saying Timothy Olyphant is a bad actor either. I haven't seen him enough works to be the judge of that because i've only ever seen him as the villian in "Live Free or Die Hard", which he did an admirable job as. All I know is that Olyphant was not the man for the role of 47. His acting was about as interesting as a piece of wood, stiff and rigid. Hell, the makers of this movie couldn't have missed the point more if they made the actor playing 47 a fully haired asian man with a lyspe.
"Wait a second, that's not Agent 47!"
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The story sucks, period
The problem with the Hitman Game is that there isn't TOO much story to string you along the length of the game. It really wasn't until they got to the latest Hitman game, Hitman: Blood Money, that the developers put a cool story in. Basically, that game had a pretty cool story that started out with the Funeral of 47 and ending with a VERY COOL twist where 47 basically comes back to life and kills everyone (atleast in my case that is what happened).
Why couldn't the developers turn that into a movie? I'd watch that in a heartbeat.
The story of the movie, Hitman, is so deeply boring that the forced action sequences make it seem like the movie is desperatley trying to keep your attention. The story goes as follows. 47 is told to kill someone and he does, yet he doesn't. The person who gets killed was a double and 47 gets in trouble because the real person doesn't get killed.
Honestly, there actually isn't much to spoil when it comes to story. The movie strings along very cliche events into one 105 minute opus of crap. There were so many points in the movie where I couldn't help but wonder things like...
"Why is Agent 47 fighting with swords?"
"Why does 47 have a love interest?"
"When is 47 going to stop shooting people and start assassinating them?"
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What horrible act...Oh, look, boobies!
If you thought 47 was badly portrayed in this movie, just wait until you meet the other characters. The first thing I noticed was the russians in the movie having bad sounding accents. It sounded like the fat police chief was battling a flemmy throat the entire time his mouth was open. I'm not russian, but I don't think that is how they sound. I'm just saying...
I don't really blaim the actors for doing a bad job, I blaim the writers for giving them awful dialog. Some of the dialog comes in at such stupid times and it sounds like the actors have to break their concentration and add these lines in just to keep the movie going. If it wasn't for that, they might have had to stop completely just to somehow fit these lines in. Hell, the movie technically flubs up when 47 speaks and his voice doesn't match the way his mouth is moving. I thought this was Hitman, not an asian kung fu movie.
A perfect example of this is when Nika and 47 are in the car when he lets her out of the trunk for the first time and Nika is eating the sandwich. Olyphant (who plays 47) goes from being so stern to being so ridiculous when he needs to correct Nika about being a disturbance. It was almost as if Olyphant would have actually flubbed his lines if he didn't "successfully" pull off the switch. Watch the movie and you'll see what I mean.
The best actor, or should I say actress, in the entire movie was Olga Kurylenko, who played Nika the love interest. She did a great job with the crap she was dealt and I admire her for that deeply. Olga even goes the extra mile of getting TOPLESS twice! Those two scenes may be the best parts of the movie because you can almost completely ignore 47 and focus on Nika. I must say, Olga is an honest to god russian beauty to behold. I wanted to ignore this entire movie and just focus on her the whole time. It is actually a shame that Nika wasn't in more of the movie. And, YES, they were spectacular...
"Olga is the best person in the movie because she did the best job and she gets topless more than once. If you weren't paying attention before, you are now."
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Why did they have to make this a Hitman movie?
Hitman is probably the most stock of all the video game movies released (other than Max Payne) because it could essentially be any movie. Just change the main character and title around and you have a completely different movie. The only thing that really made Hitman a video game adaptation was the main character, 47.
The action scenes are almost entirely pointless in Hitman, which was the biggest flaw. Hitman, the game, is NOT about tons of action. It's about secretly killing the mark or marks and escaping without being noticed. I don't think there was a single moment in the movie where 47 was actually doing something secretly. He was either with Nika or plenty of baddies the entire movie.
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The Bottom line is...
The bottom line is that Hitman is a misserable failure...as a video game movie. As a regular movie, Hitman isn't all that terrible...it's just so stock that it could literally be ANY action movie released since the 70's.
"Hitman was a misserable failure as a video game movie. Someone should have assassinated the makers of this movie before they made it."
