When I saw the awesome trailers for this movie sometime last year, or maybe it was early this year, I was very excited. I’ve owned Hitman: Silent Assassin for the GameCube for a while now and have really enjoyed it. So, I snatched up the other games in the trilogy on CPU so I would be up to date with the other Hitman games. Really, it was just a great excuse for buying a few more video games I’d been wanting for a while now. After all, who doesn’t love sneaking around the world, hiding in the shadows, killing guards, stealing their clothes, and then making a hit looking like someone else? Exactly; everyone loves it.
Well, if you have played the video game series which this movie is based on, you know just how awesome Agent 47 truly is. For the rest of you, I’ll try to explain: Agent 47 was raised and trained as a killing machine by a hidden sect of the church which focuses on cleansing evil from the Earth. Agent 47 is the best of the best; and as such, he is hired out by an organization tied to every government, gang, and corner of the world to perform professional hits for ungodly amounts of cash. This organization, which is almost so secretive it’s a myth, is known merely as The Organization. Think James Bond except secretive, conflicted, way more smooth, and minus the womanizing.
In this movie adaptation, 47 (Timothy Olyphant) is hired to take out the new, moderate President of Russia who is for some reason a threat to international affairs, but the guy he kills is a double and, in a quick turn of events, finds out that he has been compromised by The Organization. So, in an effort to save his own life and ghost-like reputation, he sets out on a personal vendetta to find and kill whoever set him up.
This cinematic transition does a fairly good job portraying this badassery but, as any copy of a novel or game, there are parts which were just better about the games… like the fact you were controlling 47 when he was taking down criminals, henchmen, and world leaders. A big plus for the movie, however, was the complete hottie who fell for Agent 47, Nika Boronina (Olga Kurylenko). Throwing a couple nude scenes in here and there can never really hurt a movie in my opinion. Heck, if they make another game in the series, they might as well throw a few nude scenes in there too.
Yet, as fun of a movie as Hitman is… I refuse to vouch for it as a quality example of modern cinema. There is action, violence, nudity, humor, and some definite drama, but the acting is average, the dialogue average, and the characters, you guessed it, average. This movie was obviously made with the expectation that you’ve played the games, or at least seen them played before, and enjoyed it. If you haven’t, it could still be a great movie going experience, but don’t expect it to rival the other huge box office hits like Casino Royale or Live Free or Die Hard. It’s a lot of fun, though, and sometimes that’s just enough.