- If you're not a member why not Start a FREE trial
- Already a member? Sign in here
- Get our newsletter
- Help
|
Hitman
The curse of the videogame movie strikes again! The Eidos shoot-em-up game gets the Luc Besson treatment here, by way of proxy director Xavier Gens. Apparently Vin Diesel was first choice for the role of two-gun killer Agent 47. Instead we get Timothy Olyphant, a more limited actor (!) best known, I guess, for having Ian McShane run rings around him in Deadwood. He's gone the whole hog and shaved off his hair, the better to show off the barcode tattooed on his skull - the kind of flip satirical gesture that works better in a comic book than in a movie, where it looks suspiciously like the dumbest accessory in the world. So, okay, we shall have to accept that we're in an alternate un-reality here (they should have cast Ryan Reynolds, it might have made more sense as another sub-section from The Nines). For three years, at least, Agent 47 has been evading Interpol's plodding Inspector Mike Whittier (Dougray Scott), who is having a hard job convincing police around the globe this phantom assassin even exists, and whose superiors are beginning to grow impatient. 47's latest assignment is to off the Russian President, Belicoff (Ulrich Thomsen - fans of Danish cinema will recognize him from Festen, Mostly Martha, Adam's Apples and Allegro). Despite his name, and a brother in the illegal arms-trade, Belicoff has declared himself a convert to moderation, a switch that has obviously upset someone; quite who, we never do find out. The assassination seems to go as efficiently as usual, except that when the news breaks it is announced that Belicoff survived. Worse, Agent 47 realises he's been set-up for a bullet. Now the question is, can he get to the bottom of this baffling conspiracy before his colleagues in the trained killer department of the Russian Un-orthodox church, the FSB or Interpol nabs him? Actually, we already know the answer to that courtesy of a clumsy prologue involving 47 and Whittier, which frames everything else we see as a flashback. So much for suspense! Still, there's always Ukrainian model Olga Kurylenko to ogle. She's the girl Agent 47 hooks up with for very little reason except, well, why wouldn't you? Not that he's interested in anything so base as carnal relations. "You don't vant to f*** me and you don't vant to kill me. I've never felt so much indifference my entire life," she pouts, one of Skip Woods' few memorable lines. (Another is less fortuitous: "When I was liddl my fazer razed grapes," she says, a heavy hint that she'd like a vineyard for Christmas.) Gens is one of the new bad boys of French cinema courtesy of his gross out nazi horror opus, Frontier(s). His work here is disappointingly unimaginative; sub Besson, sub sub Tarantino. He moves the camera around a lot, but the only motivation seemed to be to distract us from the crappy acting and hackneyed situations. Action-wise there's nothing here that wasn't done better in, say, Shooter, except perhaps for a four-way, eight-blade dagger fight in a train carriage. But even this would have been better if the train had been moving - and with the introduction of a few passengers. Given that the film's trailer suggests a more coherent plot in less than two minutes I strongly suspect someone has been chopping back at this pretty ruthlessly. What's left is a mess, you'd be better off watching Leon, Nikita or Kill Bill for the umpteenth time. Tom Charity 
More information about Hitman » Members' ReviewsReviews Voted Most HelpfulMost Recent Reviews |