The true measure of whether or not a film based on a videogame is good or not isn't whether it resembles its source material or not. The measure is the same as with all films—whether it's good or not. I believe this iteration of HITMAN (subtitled AGENT 47) is technically a reboot of the 2007 HITMAN, starring Timothy Olyphant, but it doesn't really matter. The title character is now played by the utterly bland and seemingly featureless Rupert Friend ("Homeland," STARRED UP, YOUNG VICTORIA) as the nameless, genetically modified (not to mention alarmingly bald) clone, designed to be the perfect killing machine and conditioned to operate without emotion.
The program that created him has been shut down, but he's been commissioned to track down the scientist that birthed it years earlier and is now in hiding, Litvenko (Ciarán Hinds). To find him, Agent 47 must first track down the scientist's daughter, Katia (Hannah Ware from SHAME and the Spike Lee remake of OLD BOY), who has been attempting to track down the scientist for most of her adult life. Zachary Quinto plays "John Smith," a special agent assigned to protect Katia from Agent 47; he convinces her Agent 47 is trying to kill her, but since he's Zachary Quinto, we know he's probably a dirty, lying bad guy outside of the STAR TREK movies. In fact, John Smith is working for a man named Le Clerq (Thomas Kretschmann), head of an organization called Syndicate, who also is after Katia's knowledge on her father's whereabouts so that he can restart the Agent program again.
HITMAN: AGENT 47 is a film loaded with double and triple crosses, not a great deal of straight-forward communication, and a whole lot of utterly cliche-ridden dialogue lifted from every other action movie ever made in the history of the universe. In fact, the entire film feels like things lifted from other things—like music videos, commercials, film student reels. Not surprisingly, the film is the feature debut of successful commercial director Aleksander Bach, who lovingly frames every Audi vehicle featured like he was making love to it. A big chunk the movie takes place in Singapore, which is made to look so appealing, I almost wondered if the projectionist had slipped in that country's Olympics audition reel. The film is so glossy and polished, you could ice skate across it.
It doesn't take a film history scholar to notice the similarities between this film and TERMINATOR 2—a robot-like man finding just a bit of humanity in him to protect someone who doesn't deserve to die, even though she has been selected as his next target. A seemingly nice guy (Smith) who turns out to be the true villain of the piece. The stilted banter, the heavy weaponry, the Agent's ability to predict where the next threat will come from, as if he's got a computer in his head--it's all here. And the greatest hits just keep on coming.
To say HITMAN: AGENT 47 is empty doesn't quite cover it; it's aggressively void of a soul. And just because the film features many scenes of sterile white walls that eventually become blood-splattered, it doesn't mean it has a pulse either. It certainly has spared no expense on CG blood spray. There's one sequence involving a full-size (almost oversized) jet engine that actually made me laugh out loud, partially because it offered a spark of creativity, but also it seemed a tad like the film was overcompensating for its impotent script. As a critic and audience member, you can sometimes get a sense of how a disappointing film might have been made better, even good, but I had no such illusions about HITMAN: AGENT 47. This one is a dud from start to finish.
