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- Reviewed Format: Theatrical Release
- Rated: R
- Stars: Timothy Olyphant, Dougray Scott, Olga Kurylenko, Robert Knepper, Ulrich Thomsen
- Writer: Skip Woods, based on the videogame from Eidos Interactive
- Director: Xavier Gens
- Distributor: Twentieth Century Fox
HITMAN
A videogame adaptation that feels more like a big-budget movie for USA cable... By Rachel Reitsleff
November 24, 2007
Olga Kurylenko and Timothy Olyphant in HITMAN (2007).
© 20th Century Fox
The good news about Hitman the movie is that it doesn’t especially feel like it was based on a videogame. The bad news is, it avoids this by resembling a made-for-basic-cable action thriller, distinguished by a few really exciting sequences (and more nudity, gore and language), good acting and strong production values, but saddled with a by-the-numbers storyline.
This is all the more unfortunate, because the opening scene of Skip Woods’ script indicates some ambition. The hitman of the title, known only as 47 (Timothy Olyphant), makes a surprise nighttime visit to the home of Mike Whittier (Dougray Scott), the Interpol agent who’s been tracking 47 for years. 47 wants to know how a good man, like Whittier, decides when it’s right to kill someone. Always a valid question – but one not seemingly prompted by the body of the film, which takes place three months prior to the initial sequence. 47, we learn, is one of a number of assassins raised from birth by a shadowy company that trains them in the arts of killing, then hiring their services out to the highest bidder. 47 carries out a perfect hit on the president of Russia (Ulrich Thomsen), only to find the victim live on the news shortly thereafter, proclaiming himself well after the attempt on his life. 47 suspects he’s being set up by his own people and can’t bring himself to kill Nika (Olga Kurylenko), the young woman who supposedly witnessed his crime.
Director Xavier Gens stages a few highly worthwhile violent confrontations, like a battle involving four combatants and eight swords on and around a train, and a bullet-laden gunfest in an arms dealer’s hideout. However, the scenes between 47 and Nika seem more like grace notes than actual drama. Whittier’s investigative efforts, well-played as they are by Scott, Michael Offei as his associate and Robert Knepper as the Russian official trying to thwart them, feel more like filler than the stuff of intrigue. The existential matter raised in the opening is not only not satisfactorily answered, we don’t see 47 being faced with a moment of moral crisis that would drive him to seek Whittier’s counsel. On a side note, it requires a suspension of disbelief that Whittier has been having this much trouble tracking down 47 – how difficult can it be to spot a tall bald guy with a bar code on the back of his head?
Olyphant is smooth and alert as 47, credible as an operative, albeit a little worldly for 47’s ascetic upbringing, and Kurylenko is reminiscent of Sophie Marceau, lovely and vulnerable and a bit dangerous.
The upshot of all this is that Hitman isn’t as action-packed as its roots would lead us to expect, and not as thoughtful as it seems to wish to be. It’s made decently and it’s sometimes diverting, but mostly it feels like something we’ve often seen before.