Five-Legged Iguana

HITMAN
(Review)

Xavier Gens’ Hitman (based on the Eidos computer game) opens to the strains of Schubert, as we are treated to a montage of bald kids being tattooed with bar codes and raised and trained to be killing machines (like something out of Dark Angel).*
Then, within a framing sequence involving a grown-up Agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant) and Interpol operative Michael Whittier (Dougray Scott), we flash back three months and enter a rogue assassin thriller we’ve all probably seen before.

In Hitman, we are treated to two of the genre’s stock scenarios: the “assassin is assigned a hit, which turns out to be a set-up,” and the “assassin is assigned a comely target of the opposite gender, whom the assassin doesn’t kill, and ends up on the run with (romantic/sexual entanglement optional).”
It’s probably this decision to utilize these painfully familiar riffs that make Hitman a rather disappointing film. The plot elements that could have provided some fresh ground to cover—notably The Organization, who, in the film, turn orphans and unwanted children into single-minded assassins; and just who is 47 (he is a genetically engineered being in the game, with 47 chromosomes in his DNA, though nothing of the sort is even implied here)—are basically ignored in favour of the pedestrian scenarios used in Skip Wood‘s script. Wood (who also penned the script for Swordfish and is responsible for the screenplay for the upcoming G.I. Joe) just doesn’t deliver anything particularly original or even interesting here.
Sad, since some of Hitman’s action is actually serviceable.
Of course, the cast leaves much to be desired anyway, so maybe this was all a lost cause to begin with.

Olyphant made me pay attention to him after his work on Scream 2 (he really didn’t do much in Danny Boyle’s A Life Less Ordinary). He also impressed me in Doug Liman’s Go. And Dreamcatcher being a bad movie really had nothing to do with him, so when Vin Diesel stepped out of 47’s suit (Diesel still retains an executive producer credit on Hitman), I was looking forward to Olyphant’s take on the role. Sadly, though, there are moments where there seems to be something vaguely non-committal about Olyphant’s performance, as if his Agent 47 doesn’t quite know who he’s meant to be.

And while Prison Break’s Robert Knepper (as Russian secret service dude Yuri Marklov) only serves to distract, since I couldn’t quite shake T-Bag from my head, Olga Kurylenko (as comely female target turned fellow fugitive Nika Boronina) is unconvincing; Kurylenko appeared in Vincenzo Natali’s “Quartier de la Madeleine” segment of Paris, Je T’aime and will be seen in the next 007 film, the funkily-titled Quantum of Solace.
Sure, she’s sexy and hot (thus, her date with 007), but she didn’t really act here.
Lost’s future vision-stricken Desmond, Henry Ian Cusick, also has a disastrous turn as arms dealer Udre Belicoff. I’m honestly not sure if it was just me, but that looked like some awfully dodgy looping on Cusick’s part. I’m not even certain if that was Cusick’s voice at all; if it wasn’t, then the bad performance wasn’t entirely his fault. (And to be fair, the script didn’t give much for the character to do other than end up in 47’s sights anyway, in which case, the fault would lie on Cusick’s agent’s head, for fobbing this role off on him.)
Scott probably gives the best consistent performance in the lot, but at the same time, this also isn’t the best performance I’ve seen from him.

As I mentioned above, some of Hitman’s action sequences are actually all right—the hotel and subway sequences come to mind—but whatever tension and suspense they may engender are undermined by the narrative’s structure: since we see both 47 and Whittier at the top of the film, then flash back three months, we know that both will survive any possible life-threatening situations they may encounter in the main bulk of the film itself.
Why get worked up about the character’s chances of getting out alive, when we already know they are alive in three months’ time? Thus, the only genuine tension we can hope for is at the tail end of the film, when we exit the flashback, and return to the framing sequence.
Admittedly, this tack sometimes works—David Fincher used it to excellent effect in Fight Club (I never got to read the novel, so I’m not sure if this was also the narrative structure used by Chuck Palahniuk there)—but a lot of the time (recall J.J. Abrams’ Mission: Impossible 3), it doesn’t.

In the end though, if it’s any consolation, Hitman isn’t a heinous film.
And more to the point—at least perhaps for some—Hitman isn’t a heinous film adaptation of a video game.
It is, however, not particularly impressive either.

* The end credits, in fact, acknowledge the use of clips from Dark Angel, though I don’t recall seeing any (like on a television set or movie house screen) during the film’s proceedings.
At least, I recall seeing that Dark Angel credit…
Though I did get to see some episodes of it, I was never a Dark Angel fan, so I can’t really say for certain, but were those opening shots actually from Dark Angel? (Because if they were, why did Gens choose to recycle them and not shoot his own material? Or was this a decision made after the reported Hitman re-shoots and subsequent editing by Nicolas de Toth, which supposedly did not involve Gens? Is Hitman yet another casualty of studio interference?)

Parting shot: A review of Paris, Je T’aime can be found in the Archive, along with episodic recaps/reactions to Lost.

(Hitman OS courtesy of impawards.com.)