Hitman

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

I played a demo of the Hitman videogame one time at a friend's behest, and it was cool - a simple idea with challenging gameplay, and a striking main character to guide you along: Agent 47, a bald-headed, morally ambiguous assassin with a bar code tattoed on the back of his head.

The movie version arrives with Agent 47 intact, black suit, red tie, and all. He's at the center of a capable globetrotting action movie brought down by one facet: himself.

Agent 47 is an impossible character in a live-action movie that wants to be taken seriously. The back story is that he's been trained since birth by a top-secret organization known as the Agency to carry out their murders, but the guy's look makes no logical sense: why would such a top-secret group make all of their operatives stand out in public like sore thumbs? It's really hard to impersonate a waiter, businessman, etc. when you have a specific, instantly-recognizable bar code on the back of your shiny head.

Timothy Olyphant, a remarkably charismatic actor when he gets to show some facial expressions, plays 47. He was a hoot sneering his way through Live Free or Die Hard, and he turned in three solid seasons on HBO's Deadwood. Here, the problem isn't that he looks significantly younger than the videogame character (although the gamers might find that distracting), but that he's literally not allowed to show any emotion.

The director, Xavier Gens, and the screenwriter, Skip Woods, just couldn't figure out how to successfully turn him into a plausible, workable character, and so they defaulted back to the videogames - that is, usually giving him no dialogue at all. That worked in The Bourne Ultimatum, but that character was human, and he already had our sympathies. There are actually a lot of similarities between 47 and Bourne - both were bred to be killers and both are tortured with the moral dilemma that comes with their job description. But Matt Damon made Bourne's pain visceral; 47 might as well be a robot.

The plot of the movie is fairly standard; 47 is assigned to kill the Russian president and thinks he succeeds, but then realizes he's been set up by the Agency and goes on the run with one of those trashy arrogant foreign beauties with full lips who's actually a wounded girl underneath the tough exterior. (See: xXx, the first Bourne, many Bonds, all Rush Hours, etc.) Remarkably, she manages to sneak in plenty of gratuitous nudity despite the lack of a sex scene. (Roger Ebert has the amusing but not-far-off-at-all theory that, based on the terrified/perplexed look on 47's face as she throws herself at him, he's a virgin.)

The film also sets up a nice little dynamic between 47 and Mike Whittier (Dougray Scott), an Interpol agent and a good family man who 47 respects, but must oppose, since Whittier has made it ...