I don't have a problem with video game movies, so long as I can understand them. There's nothing worse than trying to watch a movie based on a game that caters only to the people who have actually played it. I get the fact that the filmmakers want them to enjoy it and that's fine; but the rest of us deserve to have a good time, too. There are a great deal of cool looking games out there, meaning there are lots of opportunities to make entertaining movies out of them. In most cases, sadly, video game movies have been all about visuals and nothing about story, with the end result being dull or just plain dumb.I've gone to see my fair share of game movies because, hey, I like some good eye candy. In order to work, though, the eye candy needs to serve some kind of artistic purpose and not just sit there on the screen. I'm not saying it has to voice something profound about the world; I just want the visual style to speak to me as a moviegoer. I don't expect a mind blowing story either; as long as it's sturdy enough to support the rest of the movie, I can forgive the lack of complexity. The best video game movie to do this so far has been Silent Hill, due to some of the most original and frightening images I've seen in a long time. I was also quite surprised by how cynical the story turns out to be once the movie reaches the conclusion.
French director Christophe Gans obviously had a clear vision when it came to bringing Silent Hill to the screen; if only the same could be said for his countryman Xavier Gens, who was given the task of adapting Hitman. I have not played "Hitman," but know that it has developed into a series of games. With this in mind, I was certain writer Skip Woods (Swordfish) could muster up at least a decent framework for the movie's action to hang on to. Instead, there's barely anything here resembling a screenplay. What we're left with is a potentially interesting character stuck in a movie that's as lifeless as he is.
What a missed opportunity Hitman turns out to be! Even though the idea behind the movie is nothing new, I was open to it, mainly due to the casting of Timothy Olyphant. Unfortunately, he's not given much of interest to do in between the action sequences aside from walk like The Terminator and give off an emotionless stare. As a viewer, I find it hard to want to follow the adventures of a character who has absolutely no big screen appeal. I guess all the filmmakers cared about was how Olyphant would look holding a gun.
Poor Olyphant has a bad habit of picking lousy scripts. He won me over with his hilarious and downright creepy porn producer Kelly in The Girl Next Door. Aside from that and his solid work on HBO's deceased "Deadwood," Olyphant hasn't really gotten a chance to show off his chops as a straight man or a villain, as he was wasted twice last year, once as a romantic lead (Catch and Release) and as a global domination hungry baddie (Live Free or Die Hard). Most of his roles have been underwritten, a disadvantage that leaves Olyphant struggling to bring his characters to life.
In Hitman, he plays 47, a contract killer who was trained in multiple forms of combat as a child and then branded with a tattoo of a UPC code. Early in the movie, he's in Russia and has just been assigned to kill the president. To his confusion, things do not go as planned and before he knows it, his own people are trying to take him out. Oh yeah, and Interpol is after him, too. Along the way, he picks up a supposed witness to his latest job, a prostitute named Nika (Olga Kurylenko). The movie then unfolds like a low rent version of The Transporter (which was already low rent, but in a good way) as 47 does his damnedest to keep the other agents in his field from offing Nika.
If there's a crucial difference between Jason Statham's Frank Martin and 47, it's that the latter has no romantic interest in the woman he's protecting. Nika makes quite a few advances, despite the fact 47 barely pays attention to her. Worse, it seems nuts she would want to get close to him considering he makes her spend her first car ride in the trunk on top of a corpse! As a character she's completely useless, since her only real purpose in the movie is to take her clothes off as much as possible. I'm not complaining about that, mind you, but it'd be nice if she were a challenge to 47 in some way. Instead, she simply exists as a nuisance.
The picture's other key character is Mike Whittier (Dougray Scott, awful as expected), an Interpol agent who's been after 47 for three years. His role in the movie is to rave about the "ghost" he's chasing, and of course no one except his partner believes him. A good chunk of Whittier's screentime consists of arguments with the Russian police, which goes nowhere since the banter feels like nothing but a time filling plot device. I've always found Scott to be a dreadful actor, mostly because he's never been able to find the middle ground between underacting and overacting.
If anything in the movie kept me from falling asleep, it was the action scenes. The shoot outs are not particularly exciting and yet, I found myself enjoying the hand-to-hand combat scenes (47's fight in a train station is a standout). All the action is shot in an annoying kinetic style that often makes it difficult to decipher who's firing and who's been hit. I don't where the rumor started that it's fun to watch quick cuts and sped up movements during an action sequence. Even though I could rarely tell what was going on, the cinematography and production design were appealing.
Even at a brisk 94 minutes, Hitman never feels like it goes anywhere worthwhile. We've seen all this done before (and better), which wouldn't bother me if the movie had something to hold attention. The whole affair ends up coming off in some ways like a video game, since the run time is spent going from one location to the next (much like changing levels). But unlike playing a game, an activity that can be stimulating and challenging, watching Hitman does not tap into any of our senses. Ultimately, the only part of me it tapped into was the memory, urgently preparing itself to erase the movie's existence upon completion.
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Copyright, Hell and Beyond, 2008
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