Bull’s-eye on cliché: Hitman goes over familiar ground
The problem with creating the perfect assassin — see The Bourne movies if you don’t believe me — is that they will come back to haunt you. It’s like building a better boomerang: The more flawless you make it, the more likely it is to poke you in the eye.
Agent 47 (Rupert Friend) is quite flawless. He should be: As his name suggests, he’s got 46 inferior cutthroat brethren, cooked up by a secret government project that started back in the 1960s, when everything seemed like a good idea.
Compare that to the 2010s, whose bright ideas include rebooting not-very-good movies from a few years ago and turning video games into films. Hitman: Agent 47 does both. So in 2007, the same year Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer was released, moviegoers got Hitman, with Timothy Olyphant as the bald, tattooed, tuxedoed agent. And both films are based on a popular video game. So it’s like The Angry Birds Movie, except much, much angrier.
Angry certainly describes Katia Van Dees (Hannah Ware), who’s living in Berlin and obsessed with finding a mysterious man, though she knows not why. Unsatisfied with giving her one action-movie quirk, writers Michael Finch (The November Man) and Skip Woods (the first Hitman) pile on several.
There’s the giant wall map covered in push-pins and newspaper clippings, the overstuffed notebook filled with ciphers and scribbles and the out-of-focus flashbacks that suggest Katia is a mind-reader, hyper-perceptive, suffering from past trauma or, most likely, all three. She also pops pills of an unknown variety.
Speaking of movie clichés, the characters do just that. When Katia first meets up with 47 and the equally mysterious/lethal John Smith (Zachary Quinto), she’s given the ol’ one-two punch of “You don’t have any reason to believe what I’m about to tell you!” and “Do everything I say if you want to live!” All that’s missing is a quick “Trust no one!”
That’s easy for the audience, however, since the film never makes it clear whose side anyone is on — but if you don’t have a name or a number, you won’t be on anyone’s for too long. Faceless minions on both sides of the conflict get mowed down with (surprise, surprise) the regularity of targets in a video game.
Smith and 47, meanwhile, engage in a variety of shootouts, car chases and hand-to-hand combat scenes in locations as diverse as the Berlin subway, an underground parking garage and a jet-engine testing facility. Too bad they didn’t find a supermarket to fight in. It would have been fun to see the effect on Agent 47 if the bar code tattooed on the back of his head met a product scanner.
They seem equally matched, but my money’s on Smith, if only because first-time director Aleksander Bach chooses to shoot Friend’s character in slow motion, and not just while fighting. Even strolling down the street he’s been artificially decelerated. I’ve seen Romeroera zombies move faster than this guy.
At the centre of the plot is Syndicate International, which I think is the Singapore-based parent company of the bad guys in the latest Mission: Impossible movie. It’s not the best-run organization — one bigwig tells Agent 47 that if his heart stops beating, his security detail will arrive in seconds. But, surely, that’s a few seconds too late?
Best not to ask too many questions, however, as the film wends its cliché-ridden way — “you and I aren’t so very different,” “character X is your father,” etc. — to a series of unshattering revelations and a similarly marginal conclusion. Perfect movies, like perfect assassins, remain an unrealized dream in the Hitman franchise.