Dir. Xavier Gens, France/US, 2007, 100 mins
Cast: Timothy Olyphant, Dougray Scott, Olga Kurylenko, Robert Knepper, Ulrich Thomsen
Review by Matthew Rodgers
Having had the unsavoury pleasure of suffering through the Resident Evil trilogy, the self assessment titled Doom, and the current high score leader, but still not that great Silent Hill, reviewing game-to-movie adaptations is becoming as repetitive as Space Invaders circa 1980. It comes as no surprise then that Xavier Gens’ take on the top selling Eidos game has you reaching for the reset button after twenty minutes.
Timothy Olyphant (Die Hard 4.0) is cast as the bald barcode bearing Agent 47, raised as an impervious killing machine by a mysterious organisation he finds himself framed and on the run from the very people that funded his dollars-for-death lifestyle. It is an age old plot device used in everything from Day of The Jackal, via The Manchurian Candidate and finally landing at the well worn feet of spy-de-jour Jason Bourne, and the film that Hitman so badly wants to be, The Bourne Ultimatum. And therein lies the problem, the film doesn’t have an original bullet in its barrel.
Olyphant wasn’t the original choice for the monosyllabic murderer, stepping into Vin Diesel’s vacated suit, it's as if everything that makes him intriguing as an actor – edgy sarcasm and likeable confidence – has been smothered by a script that wasn’t re-written for him, or he has simply been asked to do his best Diesel impression, and if that’s the case then he succeeds in being blandly inept. It's an excuse that the remainder of the cast don’t have; Dougray Scott (MI:2), Robert Knepper (TV’s Prison Break) and Henry Ian Cusick (Lost) are all completely wasted and would struggle to compete in the depth stakes against their pixelated counterparts.
In an attempt to become Bourne for the skateboard generation Hitman also lifts the “female sidekick in distress” from Doug Liman’s Identity as Skip Woods (really?) script tries to find motivation for Agent 47. It’s a shame then that Russian model Olga Kurylenko is required to do little more than walk around scantily clad and is one of the nastiest characters an audience has been asked to root for in a long time. Stunning shape aside it would have been better had she had caught a stray bullet to save the awkward dialogue and general embarrassment.
Hitman very rarely finds its target – a high wire escape from a hotel balcony and a train carriage Mexican stand-off – and would look dated in action and plot even if it had been made in the similarly high body counting eighties. Kids, go and read a book instead.
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