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Based on the video games with the same name, Hitman follows a hired assassin known only as 47 (Timothy Olyphant) on a quest for answers. Taken in as a child and trained to kill, 47 knows no other life. Despite the fact that he looks pretty conspicuous, with his barcode tattoo at the base of his bald head, the authorities think of him as a ghost, traveling from one job to the next, eluding Interpol agents at every turn. But then an assignment goes horribly wrong, and there’s nowhere to hide.
47 travels to St. Petersburg to kill Russian president Mikhail Belicoff (Ulrich Thomsen), but after he finishes the job, he’s told that Belicoff is still alive. When he tries to fix his mistake, he discovers that he’s been set up. So, with Belicoff’s salaried girlfriend, Nika (Olga Kurylenko), tagging along, he tries to avoid his fellow assassins and stay alive long enough to find out who wants him dead.
I’m not going to waste too much time or energy picking apart Hitman’s writing—because there’s just no point. Sure, the story doesn’t make all that much sense, and it’s filled with plot holes. But that’s not why you shell out the cash to see a movie like Hitman, is it? You don’t see it for the captivating story. You see it for the adrenaline rush—for the blood and death and the exciting fight scenes and all that. And you probably think that a movie based on a video game called “Hitman” would be pretty thrilling, right? Yeah, I did, too. But despite the high body count, Hitman is surprisingly…well, lifeless. Though one of the movie’s fight scenes is, admittedly, rather interesting (it involves four bald guys fighting on a train, using swords that just happened to be stashed in their back pockets), nothing really stands out as all that thrilling. After a while, it’s just another fight scene. Just another chase. Yawn.
Of course, it probably doesn’t help that Timothy Olyphant is quite possibly the most uninteresting action star ever. Though it’s understandable that the character would be a bit socially awkward—having been raised from childhood to be a stealthy, cold-blooded assassin and all—he comes off as just plain dim. And though he’s supposed to be playing the three-dimensional version of a two-dimensional video game character, I’m quite sure that a computer-generated character could actually exhibit more personality than Olyphant does.
It’s pretty obvious that the makers of Hitman were trying to strip away as much plot as possible—to provide fanboys with some non-stop, high-voltage violence, with a bit of pointless nudity thrown in for fun. But with a dull main character, plenty of terrible acting, and a bunch of thrill-less fight scenes, Hitman isn’t as exciting as it is amusing. Sadly, though, it’s not even amusing enough to be craptacular. So if you’re a big fan of the game, a night at home with your favorite video game console would prove to be much more thrilling than a night out at the movies.
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