Review: ‘Hitman: Agent 47’

From “Super Mario Bros” to “Need For Speed,” we have been inundated with dozens upon dozens of video game movie adaptations for years, and if there is one thing that everyone can pretty much agree on, that thing is the fact that all of these movies range in quality from bad to worse to The Worst. There is no such thing as a “good” video game movie. Fun fact: “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” currently holds the highest Rotten Tomato score of any video game movie, and it is sitting at a lofty and seemingly insurmountable 36%. But surely here to save the day and reverse this trend is the latest entrant into this woe begotten genre of cinema, “Hitman: Agent 47,” and it couldn’t be that bad, could it?

Of course it can.

In “Hitman: Agent 47,” there is a lady named Katia (Hannah Ware) and she is perpetually on the run, gathering together information to find some guy though she really doesn’t know why. Doesn’t make sense? Don’t worry about, the movie doesn’t try to make sense of it. It is just something “she feels she has to do” or some bollocks like that. While she is on the run from an unseen but sensed danger, she runs into a fella named John Smith (Zachary Quinto), who at one point admits his name is Brian, but then everyone just continues to call him John Smith for the rest of the movie. So who cares what his real name is? Anyway…she runs into John Smith, and he’s all like “I know who you are and who you are looking for and I can save you” and this is when Agent 47 (Rupert Friend) turns up, stalking her, acting like the Terminator, with John Smith doing the Kyle Reese part to Katia’s Sarah Connor, but because we know going in to this movie that the title character is the “hero,” we know how this is going to end.

The rest of the movie is Agent 47 protecting Katia but also kind of mentoring her to be a bad ass super assassin like him, while she finishes her quest to find this dude who is important to her for some reason though she didn’t know why initially. Of course, since we’ve seen movies before, we have a pretty damn good guess as to who this older man is in relation to this young woman, and yes, that guess you just made right now, that’s the answer. It’s that simple and obvious. Meanwhile it is revealed that John Smith is working for a group called “Syndicate International,” which is just about the most overtly bad guy name for a corporation that anyone could come up. Maybe they thought “Evil Doers LLC” or “We’re Trying to Rule The World Corp” were too over the top and wanted something more subtle. Syndicate International wants to make a whole army of super human engineered agents like Agent 47, so they need Agent 47 or Katia or the man she’s looking for, or any combination of them, in order to get the information they need. So it is a good thing these three people get together and stay together, makes it much easier for “Bad Guys Limited” to find them and try to kill them.

“Hitman: Agent 47” is about as uninspired and unoriginal as it gets. In a world in which movies like “The Raid” and “John Wick” exist, you really have to do something special to impress with your hand to hand fighting and gun action, and the action in this movie is about as rote as it gets, with the few big “stunts” being so obviously CG that it looks like a scene from the video game from which it is adapted. And if you want to do a car chase scene, you better shoot for the moon because in the wake of “Death Proof” and the “Fast and Furious” movies and the various Tom Cruise action films of the last couple of years, we have plenty of over the top and awesomely made car chases to choose from, if you can’t bring anything really special, then why are you bothering? The only reason they even have cars in this movie is because they are trying to sell some Audis, because of course when watching a movie about a bald, boring killer, we’ll get the sudden urge to go down to Big Ed’s Audi Dealerships of Ohio and Illinois and sign up for a brand new lease as soon as this movie ends.

That’s really the overall problem with this movie – it demonstrates no real reason to exist. The story is quite uninspired and the characters are as bland as they get. Agent 47 is described as a person genetically engineered so that he doesn’t have any anxiety or fear or doubt and he doesn’t love or worry or get happy or sad or anything, all of that is suppressed and removed to make him a better killer, but it also makes him a very boring movie character. He has no emotions, he just walks around all bald and whatnot, killing people and changing clothes on a whim, and actually he goes around injuring and killing a bunch of people who didn’t deserve to get hurt, they were just doing their jobs or were in the wrong place at the wrong time, so this guy is kind of a dick actually.

Really this movie kind of blew a big opportunity. This Hitman character should be the BAD GUY in these movies, he’s an emotionless killing machine, works slow and methodical, never rushing, he’s like Michael Myers in “Halloween,” he is the invincible killer with no name, and this movie should have had the John Smith character really be the good guy and really try to help Katia get away from this psycho killer who can’t be stopped. This should be like a slasher movie but with guns. Like “John Carpenter’s Natural Bourne Killer” or something like that. You know that would be a great movie. Just because you play as this character in some video game doesn’t mean he has to be the good guy in this movie. Switch it up, do something daring, because otherwise you get boring, by the numbers dreck like this.

Of course, what should be expected from a movie based on a screenplay from the writer of “Swordfish” and “X-Men: Origins – Wolverine” and “A Good Day to Die Hard?” This is common sense, people, lay down with dogs, you’re gonna get fleas.