Jennifer Fallon - the Official Site

I really admired Timothy Olyphant on Die Hard 4, where he played the evil genius Thomas Gabriel with certain saviour faire that made being evil look cool, almost noble, even. I admire him even more after seeing this movie, mostly because he manages to utter the most absurd dialogue while keeping a straight face. That takes talent.

Directed by Xavier Gens, who also bought us such high art as The Good, the Bad and the Zombies, and written by the man who penned the ill-timed Swordfish, Hitman is based on a video game, and you can deduce the audience it’s pitched at in the first scene which informs us this is London – England, so we don’t get it confused with all the other Londons out there, I suppose. Ditto with Moscow. I mean I was grateful for the heads up. One could easily mistake the shots of the Kremlin and a city of 10,000,000 people for the Kansas town of the same name (Population 247).

But I digress, let’s get back to the plot, that revolves around a shadowy organisation called the Agency, which apparently trains assassins from birth in a “secret organisation” nobody knows about… except, if nobody knows about it, how come Mike the Interpol Guy (Dougray Scott) has been tracking our mysterious agent, known only as 47 (Olyphant), for 3 years and can ascribe at least 100 hits to him? Oh, and then there’s the minor issue of his disguise. It could be me, but somehow, in this age of CCTV and satellites that can take pictures up your nostrils if you look up at the wrong time, you’ve gotta wonder why they don’t have so much as a snapshot of this 6’ bald guy with a barcode tattooed on the back of his head who wanders around the world killing rich and important people who have lots of bodyguards and high-tech security surrounding them. It’s things like this that remind you that you’re watching a video game bought to life, because in Videogameland, nobody remarks on that sort of thing. Actually, in Videogameland nobody talks much at all, so you’re pretty much off the hook in that regard. 

So, in addition to Agent 47, with his bald head and totally inconspicuous barcode tattoo, we have a bizarre plot involving the Russian President, his sex slave, and arms dealer and several other assassins sent to kill our boy 47, because… well, I think it has something to do with him knowing the truth about the identity of the new and improved version of the Russian President, but I suspect it has more to do with setting up the most ridiculously staged excuse for a sword fight I have ever seen. The plot inconsistencies to get us to the point where we have not one, but four (yes, four) bald headed, totally inconspicuous, barcode-tattooed assassins fighting it out with swords in a major St Petersburg railway station, defy description. Either way, you’d think this mysterious Agency, having invested so much training their top assassin from birth, wouldn’t turn on him quite so readily, just because a client wants him silenced. I would have thought there was an implied confidentiality agreement that went along with hiring, you know, an assassin. 

In the middle of all this, we have the odd relationship between the sociopathic 47 and the sex slave (Olga Kuylenko) he is sent to kill, but somehow ends up saving. This relationship should have been the core of the film and in places it has glimmers of something much more profound that might have appeared in an earlier version of the script. These are two very damaged people with a common enemy yet the relationship never quite gets there, nor is the progression of their relationship believable. This is a pity, because it would have been a much better film if we had more character development and a little less ammo flying about. 

Hitman teeters on the edge of being good. It doesn’t take itself too seriously, and you can’t fault the acting, even if some of the dialogue is just plain cringeworthy. But if you’re looking for some mindless, shoot-em-up fun, then you should probably just buy the game and be done with it.