‘Hitman’ misses the mark
Though remake delivers plenty of thrills, dull violence, lack of excitement a turn-off
(4) HITMAN AGENT 47: Director: Aleksander Bach. Starring: Zachary Quinto, Rupert Friend, Ciaran Hinds, Thomas Kretschman, Hannah Ware, Emilio Rivera. (Bridge, Baywest, Boardwalk, Walmer Park)
HITMAN is a Danish-produced stealth video game franchise in which you play a bald, cloned assassin with a barcode on the back of his head.
Timothy Olyphant played the role in a French-American co-production, in 2007 – a moderate global hit, but not well-received enough to spawn a conventional sequel.
Instead, they have simply done it over, this time with German money, a different star (Rupert Friend) and a distinctly more clinical tone.
The odd point of overlap is that Hitman: Agent 47 gives a story and screenplay credit to one Skip Woods, who also did the earlier film. Writers-for-hire routinely have to tear their scripts up and start from scratch, but it’s rare to have one actually made and then pretend it never happened.
Like the main character he’s writing around, Woods has a job to do that you’d ideally take your name off: if the hit goes well, it’s best all round if you manage to slink off unnoticed.
We are plunged into the action in Salzburg, where Friend’s nameless agent goes head-to-head with members of a dastardly global corporation.
The head of this outfit, a man called Le Clerq, is played behind a bank of touch-screen remote controls by the German Liam Neeson, Thomas Kretschmann.
This unsmiling boss does so much brisk left-swiping to terminate calls with his underlings, you wouldn’t fancy your chances with him on Tinder.
Next to Berlin, where a hit is taken out on mysterious female lead Katia van Dees (Hannah Ware).
Protecting her from Friend is a guy, who calls himself John Smith (Zachary Quinto), before admitting that his name is actually Brian, in one of the very few gestures at humour the film permits itself.
Commercials director Alek- sander Bach handles the action with as much strobe lighting and mechanical efficiency as he can possibly cram into each sequence: the film’s as ruthlessly competent as a fresh-off-the-line BMW.
What it lacks is much excitement, or any soul, and it might be the most asexual genre flick ever made.
Like a hollow-cheeked Terminator, Friend walks through the film impassively at all times, delivering stock death to a variety of equally robotic armed opponents.
He’s not the one equipped with sub-dermal titanium body armour, but he might as well be.
Bach loves chucking these ever-replenishing baddies into industrial grinders and engine rotors, thinks the donation of a switchblade to a pre-teen boy is pretty cool, and appears to have programmed out pain or feeling from his aesthetic as surely as Agent 47’s taskmasters. The film makes you miss the interesting loneliness and moral conscience of the Bourne series – especially Supremacy.
Those films made a genuine tally of their losses, counted the cost, and didn’t shrug off consequence as a wimpish afterthought. This one is all perfectly aimed bullets ricocheting, through blood, off nothing. – The Telegraph