Hitman Review

Hitman-ReviewThere are a few unbreakable laws in life. Tomorrow you will be older, Star Wars geeks get laid less than the average man (I know this from harsh bitter experience) and Video Game movies suck. Hey, I don’t make the rules… I just observe them. However, the most recent batch of trailers, clips and images from HITMAN gave me a brief glimpse of hope that maybe… just maybe this movie will have some decent entertainment value. Did it?

THE GENERAL IDEA

Hitman follows the story of a professional assassin who only goes by the name of Agent 47 (Played by Timothy Olyphant). 47 is a lethal killing machine who was trained since birth by a group called “The Organization” to be one of the world’s best assassins. 47 has killed hundreds of targets all over the world… but when instructed to assassinate the Russian President, 47 finds himself double crossed and becoming a target by the very organization he had been serving. Hot on his heals is an INTERPOL Agent (played by Dougray Scott) who has been pursuing him for 3 years.

THE GOOD

The film has a beautiful style to it. Fans of the video game will certainly appreciate much of the art direction, cinematography and costumes. I swear I think they went out of their way to ensure the back of Timothy Olyphant’s head (It’s tattooed with a barcode… not exactly the best way to blend in) was on camera even more than his face was. But even that was done in such a way that made the shots look quite cool, and was a tip of the hat to the game fans to feel the essence of the visuals from the game itself.

Olga Kurylenko plays the would be love interest… and I know this comment has little to do with the artistic benefits she brought to the film… but HOLY CRAP IS SHE HOT. Whenever the camera had a close up of her stunning eyes, I would temporarily forget where I was. She’s also naked for half the movie, but that’s neither here nor there. But it should also be mentioned that even though the material she was given to work with was laughable most of the time, she was almost able to salvage it. Which leads us to….

THE BAD

The dialog in this movie was outright PAINFUL at times. As Doug and I sat in the theater, I counted no less than 5 times we silently turned to each other with a “Did they really just say that?” look on our faces. It’s a video game movie so Shakespeare isn’t required … but at least have dialog that isn’t SO bad that it becomes a distraction.

The story is one that’s been done a hundred times just in the last couple of years alone. The killer/assassin is double crossed by those they work for and they themselves become the target (Shooter, Art of War, ect..). It was pretty predictable and didn’t bring much new to the table.

MAJOR inconsistencies. For example (and this doesn’t give anything away), 2 police officers are talking about a guy who was just killed “3 hours ago”… then they turn on the tv and hear a reporter talking about the SAME GUY, who’s funeral is TOMORROW since he died 2 DAYS AGO. Also, at one point in the film 3 other assassins from The Organization come to kill 47. Got that? They all come together with the same goal of killing agent 47… but for some reason when they all reveal themselves, they’re all pointing guns at each other. Yes, it made for a cool looking shot, but it made no sense whatsoever. As soon as the fighting started, they’re on the same side… but thought it was important to strike a cool looking pose and have each gun pointing at a different person… even if that other person is ON YOUR TEAM. Dumb.

Someone needs to tell the director that just because someone is shooting a gun, that doesn’t mean it’s “action”. For all the bullets and all the killing, there was next to no action (unforgivable in an Action Video Game Movie). Don’t get me wrong, there were one or two pretty decent scenes, but that’s about it. The rest of the time was 47 in slow motion just pointing his gun and pulling the trigger. YAAWWWNNN.

As much as I like Timothy Olyphant, he was terribly miscast. Doug said it best to me walking out of the theater: “Even when 47 was supposed to be acting awkward, he looked awkward acting awkward”. Very true. There was no conviction in the lines, he looked too pretty to be a weathered killer, and you just never bought into the idea that he was this leathal killing machine that 47 is supposed to be.

OVERALL

What can I say? It’s a video game movie… and it’s not good. Some nice cinematography and crazy hot naked female lead just aren’t enough to make up for a weak story, poorly done action, painful dialog and overdone story line. Certainly not the worst video game movie ever made, but that’s not saying much. I give Hitman a 4 out of 10.

View the Hitman review here:


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28 thoughts on “Hitman Review

  1. Okay, so I read the review here first but decided to go for the movie anyway. You’re right – it was really horrible. The dialog was really too painful. :D

    This goes out to everyone else who’s watched the movie BTW: “Breakfast anyone?” :P

  2. This is the worst movie I’ve seen all year. The direction was atrocious. Trying to be too stylish and not focusing on the story. The script was bad. Bad. The acting was bad. The chick was… well, hot. This movie wanted to be the Bourne films as evident by the copycat score, but it comes nowhere near those films. Terrrible. Just terrible.

  3. John and Doug OWNED this review!

    Superman sucks on games, some good movies suck on games (Fight Club), and games suck as movies. Except for the movie-to-game part, when will someone break this curse?

  4. I have to believe that someday…..somwhere out there, beneath the pale moonlight…..ahem, a video game movie will come along and not suck.

    My brother has been really looking forward to this and he’ll probably end up saying it was great (he loved ‘Chuck & Larry’ for heavens sake). The good thing is that, if the film flops, Fox won’t be able to blame it on the recent Hitman video game because there isn’t one. Does anyone remember when they did that to explain why Tomb Raider 2 flopped?

  5. Hmmm, I was pretty sure that Gens was not involved in many of the post-production elements in the film.

    And I was addressing ‘I counted no less than 5 times we silently turned to each other with a “Did they really just say that?” look on our faces.’ with the language/nationality issue. I’ve seen several directors lose a lot of ooomph to their movie because their ear for dialogue is tinny when not in their mother-tongue…but then again, I’m not sure if Gens & co wrote the screenplay or not…

  6. @Kurt:

    No, the film was never taken away from Xavier Gens. That was a made up internet rumor from a few months ago regarding the alleged film’s editing down to a PG-13. Also, being French has nothing to do with it. If ‘Hitman’ was directed by, say, Luc Besson or Louis Leterrier…it would probably be called ‘Transporter 3’.

    But you are right about video game adaptations to film. The majority of them-even the few succesful ones-have roots in theatrical and/or cult films. (Even the first ‘Mortal Kombat’, which is ‘Enter The Dragon’ with CGI FX and techno music)…but with the ‘Bourne’ films, ‘Shooter’ even ‘Most Wanted’…yeah, this ‘Hitman’ story is shamelessly recycled.

    *****

    @Gio

    Where’s a review for ‘No Country For Old Men’? While it is a drama, there’s action scenes in it; why do I have this thought that ‘Old Men’ has better action in it than ‘Hitman’?

    Better developed characters?
    Better story?
    Suspense?

    The mind boggles.

    *****

    New/updated design:
    Meh.
    MB just found use of the ‘more’ tag in WP.
    Big whoop-dee do, int’l friends.

    Happy turkey day.

  7. Dang, I was hoping for something better with this one. Perhaps the awkward dialogue stems for a director directing actors in a language this is not his first (Xavier Gens is french). Perhaps it is the second director (project was taken from Gens and reshoots were done) that killed things. Either way, it’s sad that this (and Silent Hill for that matter) are not the movie that finally gives video games movies some credibility…

    Biggest problem with Video Game related movies is the the folks who made the video game in the first place, probably were just simplifying and copying movie ideas in the first place. So by the time it gets back to a movie, it’s like a copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy, which of course doesn’t attract key directing talent, and then ends up sucking, a perpetual spiral of poor quality and poor credibility. Maybe video game movies will just finally go away and people can focus on some original material…

  8. I like the new way the front page looks. Now that you guys are like the busiest i have ever seen, writing a ton of posts, it helps. It is easier on the scrolling down through paragraphs, because once i was getting behind on the posts on the old way i was skimming anyway.

    Sooooo what I’m saying is, The Movie Blog rules.

  9. Hey JP,

    It’s not about page views (Page views are useless anyway, only Unique Visitors matter at all). It’s about making it easier to find a story that interests you.

    You’ll notice on the individual post pages, there is an extra menu on the side of “Most recent posts” so that if you click on a story you want to read on the main page, you don’t have to go back to the main page to read the next story that interests you, because a list of the newest posts are right there in the side menu.

    I’m going to try this for now and see how I feel about it in a week or two.

  10. I put “for doug nagy” at the end, because at the end of the review thats what John said for some reason and i was making a joke…but i think BOTH of you did an awesome job lol…dont want to leave John out of it.

  11. First, I’m pissed this movie is gonna suck, i HAVE to see it anyway just because ive been anticipating it, i need to see it for myself.

    Second, I left a comment earlier on the video uncut podcast about how i didn’t like it as a video, so im sticking with audio. But the video Reviews are REALLY good, i LOVED watching you two on this. more video movie reviews i hope in the future.

    For Doug Nagy, awesome job!

  12. Aww that’s bad news. I’m going to see this with my cousin Ryan over Thanksgiving weekend, who LOVES the game and says he’s gonna dress as 47 when we go see it…friggin nerd:) I was at least hoping for a good dumb action movie, but damn, a 4 and 3 out of ten? Yeesh!

    BTW, Doug staring into the camera at the beginning made me bust out laughing. I can’t even see his face without laughing:)

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