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.)

DEXTER
Season 2 Episode 6
‘Dex, Lies, and Videotape’
Written by Lauren Gussis
Directed by Nick Gomez
(WARNING: SPOILERS)

Last episode’s hopeful note is shot to sh!t as things unravel on Dex rather quickly.

Discovering Harry’s affair with his mother, Dex realizes that the man he’s idolized and followed all these years was less than the paragon of virtue he believed him to be.
And without that foundation to depend on, Dex realizes he doesn’t know who he is anymore, or who he’s supposed to be. Lila believes this time of uncertainty allows Dex the golden opportunity to reinvent himself.
Dex has one triumph (he’s able to delete the footage of his cleaning his boat, during a juvenile fire alarm diversion), but gets clipped by a whole mess of other things.

Doakes gets back on Dex’s a$$ when he has a conversation with Deb and she tells him quite plainly that, No, of course Dex isn’t an addict.
So Dex finds Doakes listening to the tapes of Harry and his mother, getting Dex and Doakes into that potentially violent stare off that we’ve all been waiting for.
Dex ends up bringing the whole thing to LaGuerta, who manages to convince Dex to hold off on the official complaint while she talks with Doakes.
LaGuerta’s chat with Doakes only convinces LaGuerta that Doakes is obsessed, a side of him she’s seen and a side of him that cost them their relationship. She tells Doakes to let this one go. (We all know he won’t though, right?)

Lila meanwhile, has dinner with Rita and Gail (at Gail’s instigation), an encounter that leads to Rita overhearing a phone message from Lila to Dex, where she stupidly mentions, “Oh, it’s good I didn’t slip up and mention the road trip and that we spent the night together.”
Duh.
Rita dumps Dex’s a$$ in an emotional New York minute.
Pissed off about that (and the thing with Doakes), Dex gets angry at Lila, the sort of angry that conveniently alchemizes into hot sex. Then, just as Dex leaves Lila to get back to work, Rita calls him and says they should talk later that evening.

While all that psychodrama’s going down, there’s a Bay Harbor Butcher copycat who makes a botched attempt at a home invader just out of jail.
The copycat turns out to be Ken Olson (Prison Break’s Silas Weir Mitchell), whose mother was once hurt by the recently released jailbird, and claims to have been inspired by the Bay Harbor Butcher’s handiwork. When Dex digs around to find some dirt on Olson, he discovers that Olson‘s actually killed before, so Dex does him in, but doesn’t bother to dispose of the body parts this time out, leaving them for the cops to find.

After his date with Olson, Dex drops by Rita’s and they have their talk.
Dex says the road trip was for him to try to get closure regarding his mother’s murder, and that it was strictly sponsor and sponsee between Lila and him.
And though Rita’s hurt that Dex chose to share this pivotal moment in his life with Lila and not her, she’s apparently willing to accept that.
But.
She asks Dex if he had sex with Lila in that motel room, and Dex says, “No. Not then.”
And once again, Rita dumps Dex’s a$$ in an emotional New York minute.

Dex leaves Rita’s, walking out into a downpour, symbolic of his becoming a new man, as all that was taught him by Harry has come to be suspect.
And who does Dex go to after leaving Rita’s?
Lila.
Ugh.
This better be resolved quickly, as I’ve come to really care about Rita as she’s grown into this stronger person since Season 1, and I’ve never really warmed to Lila. (And let’s face it, it was her big mouth that got Dex into hot water with Rita in the first place.)

Over on the Deb front, Lundy’s sudden interest in Dex (which gets Dex para over a fair section of the episode) raises her issues about Dex always being the “Morgan superstar.” When she brings this up with Gabriel, he instinctively hones in on the fact that Deb’s crushing on her boss.
Towards the episode’s end, Deb’s gotten anxious that Lundy’s about to turn the whole investigation over to the FBI (thus returning her to “retard” status, since she feels Lundy was the only one who really took her seriously), and she asks him flat out, and he says, “No. I’m afraid you’re still stuck with me.”
Then, when Lundy asks for Dex yet again, Lundy notices Deb’s reaction, and calls her on it. So Deb spills the beans, but Lundy says it’s not about Dex. It’s just that Masuka’s getting on his tits and he wants some other forensics dude to depend on.
Relieved, Deb hugs Lundy, a little too long, and quite definitely awkwardly…

Parting shot: Congratulations to Michael C. Hall, Tim Schlattmann and all the other writers on the show, as well as the entire cast and crew, for getting the Golden Globe and WGA noms, and the AFI nod. (See Afterthoughts (33) & (34) in the Archive.)

(Image courtesy of sho.com.)

THE GRAVEDANCERS
(Review)

Ding!
It’s Round 5 of the on-going b*tchslapping bout between the Five-legged Iguana and the After Dark Horrorfest line-up.
The challenger this round: Mike Mendez’s The Gravedancers.

Harris (Prison Break’s Dominic Purcell) attends the funeral of a college friend (at the bizarrely misspelled “Cresent View Cemetery”) and thanks to his loser friend Sid (Marcus Thomas), ends up messing around with something called “The Gravedancers’ Lament,” a spell which awakens three vengeful spirits that then go about and make life a living hell for them, as well as their other friend Kira (Josie Maran, one of Dracula’s brides in Stephen Sommers’ Van Helsing), and Harris’ wife Allison (Clare Kramer, Glory from TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer).
Cue a pair of paranormal investigators, Vincent (Tcheky Karyo, from the Luc Besson-directed The Messenger and the Luc Besson-produced Kiss of the Dragon) and Culpepper (Megahn Perry), throw in some unresolved issues between old friends, and you’ve got a film that’s certainly (and thankfully) better than Dark Ride and Wicked Little Things, though falls far short of the high bar established by The Abandoned.

One of The Gravedancers’ main problems is that oftentimes, the supernatural shenanigans are never convincingly terrifying enough to be truly scary. In fact, there are moments when things get vaguely ridiculous, and the hoped for screams sometimes pop out of the audience’s mouths as chuckles and laughter.
I mean, when there is actually a physical brawl between Purcell and the ghost that is tormenting him, well, you have to admit to the strangeness of it all.
Which is not to say The Gravedancers is without any saving grace.
It does have its moments (as evidenced by the screencap above), and I’ll admit to a couple of effective “jump” moments that actually got me, but the production never really pushes the material to its logical horrific extreme. There are even some awkward attempts at levity that never quite work, and seem badly out of place given the very serious matter at hand.

The performances aren’t exactly awards-worthy either, particularly that of Marcus Thomas, whose Sid is simply an annoying piece of horror movie dead meat, and the fact that all the trouble is his fault and he never really seems repentant about that just makes matters worse.
The script meanwhile, compounds the problem, with character confrontations taking place at the most inopportune and inappropriate moments. (Focus, people! Ghosts are out to kill us! Let’s get all Dr. Phil after we’ve survived the night…)

If you’re curious though, or happen to be a hardcore Purcell fan (you’re certainly not gonna see an axe-wielding piano teacher kick Purcell’s a$$ on Prison Break!), then you may want to check The Gravedancers out.
It isn’t a total loss, and hey, if Giant Flying Spectral Heads float your boat, then go knock yourself out.

Parting shot: Check the Archive for reviews of the other After Dark Horrorfest titles, The Abandoned, Dark Ride, and Wicked Little Things.

(The Gravedancers OS courtesy of bloody-disgusting.com.)