Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
11/23/07
I'm young enough to have
a Playstation 2, but old enough that my game collection consists primarily
of classic games and spinoffs from my favorite TV shows. Thus, I'm
a stranger to the immorally amoral universe of Agent 47, the genetically
created Hitman who kills for the cleverly named The Organization.
If his movie adventure is any indication, I'm a lucky guy. As boring
as it is loud, Hitman bypasses pesky things like character, motivation
and ethics in favor of 100 minutes of Strip Strip, Bang Bang. The
first on-screen words are “London, England,” and it's all downhill from
there.
Interpol Agent Mike Whittier
(Dougray Scott) comes home one night to find Agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant;
it actually takes over an hour to learn his name/number, but I don't know
if it's supposed to be a mystery or the movie just forgets that it hasn't
gotten around to mentioning it) in his study. 47, a bald guy with
a bar code tattooed on the back of his head, has a question: How
does a good man know when it's all right to kill someone? To elaborate
(well, honestly to kill time), he tells a story, much of which he could
not possibly know because it was Whittier and not he who was there for
it. The Interpol Agent has been chasing a mystery assassin around
the globe at great expense for three years. That assassin is 47,
who's just been assigned to kill Russian President Belicoff (Ulrich Thomsen).
Why? Well, the movie damns him with faint praise by saying he's "moderate".
Anyway, our anti-hero rubs him out in a very public manner only to find
TV reports showing the grazed President alive and well and 47's employers
vaguely interested in getting rid of him. Which is to say, from time
to time he runs into another bald guy with a bar code and a fight breaks
out. Before The Organization turned on him, 47 was to assassinate
Nike Boronina (Olga Kurylenko), a prostitute in Belicoff's employ, but
instead he saves her and they spend some time on the run together.
She keeps taking her clothes off and he keeps begging her to put them back
on. Luckily, he's not nearly so squeamish about putting bullets in
people's heads, and he's got a plan to use Belicoff's slimeball brother
Udre (Henry Ian Cusick) against him and, well, that's about it.
The Hitman trailer
promises a substantially different movie experience: a prologue explaining
how The Organization “recruits” its' killers as orphans not only flies
in the face of Agent 47's video game origin (trust me, I looked it up)
but uses stock footage from the TV show Dark Angel, telling me it
was hastily tacked on to eliminate the sci-fi/religious elements of the
trailer's story. I kept waiting for some reason other than Olyphant's
confident, charismatic performance to give a damn whether 47 lived or died,
and it never came. Whittier and his partner (Michael Offei) are the
movie's only likable characters, while a couple of my favorite TV actors,
Cusick and Robert Knepper, waste their time as oily Russian goons (Udre
alone could probably heat my house for a month). The scenes between
47 and Nike are alternately disgustingly misogynistic (what movie hero
in this day and age spends his time grabbing women by the arm and shoving
them where he wants them to go) and ridiculous. I must say that the
“I hate naked women” thing 47's got going on is the single silliest character
trait I've seen in a long time. If he ever gives up assassination,
his love of brutal mayhem and fear of nudity and sexuality should give
him a bright future with the MPAA. How unfortunate that he should
end up paired with a woman who spends more time naked than Britney Spears!
Otherwise, there's not much
here other than shooting: an inspired sequence where a would-be gun
battle between 47 and three of his fellow assassins breaks down into a
swordfight is the closest thing the movie has to a real action scene.
It makes a show of caring who lives and who dies (47 knocks some nice people
out rather than kills them, and his bullets are polite enough not to hit
women even when he shoots indiscriminately in their presence), but the
movie's worldview can never get past “Killing is cool. Huh huh huh
huh”. And the outside world is strangely uninterested in a man who
keeps assassinating the same Russian President over and over again.
It must drive him crazy: “How many times do I have to kill this guy
before somebody notices?”
Someone seems to have done
a pretty good job of editing what was probably a substantially longer Hitman
down from a mess into an assault of bland homicidal sameness. I kept
chuckling at being informed that we were in “Moscow, Russia” and lines
like “I'll call the Russian Secret Police,” but otherwise it's hard to
muster an emotional response. That Olyphant emerges unscathed is
a testament to the star he could become. Director Xavier Gens (assistant
director of the oddly similar Jean-Claude Van Damme bomb Maximum Risk)
and writer Skip Woods (who did the honors on the equally greasy Swordfish)
have done this kind of thing before and they'll probably do it again.
Hitman video game fans are probably better off shooting imaginary
characters in the head themselves than watching somebody else do it.
And I'd have been better off sticking with Pac-Man. |
