Hitman

Hitman (2007)

Moderately Trashy
Ranking: No

Another great video game adaptation - when are people going to learn that it just doesn't work? Watching another person play a video game is really fucking boring, so why should watching an incomprehensible movie based on a VG be even remotely interesting?

I'm not entirely sure exactly what the plot of this movie was. There's this hitman (Timothy Olyphant) who works for a secret society of all male, all bald hitmen. He is hired to assassinate the Russian leader (Ulrich Thompson) and somehow gets framed or betrayed or something and must team up with a prostitute (Olga Kurylenko) and run around Russia being chased by Interpol, the Russian military and guys from his own organization. And he blows away a bunch of people for reasons known only to him.

I tried hard to understand what was going on, I really did. I kept asking Mr. Green if he had any idea, as he's played the VG, but he didn't know either. I'm sorry, maybe I was missing something, but I had no fucking idea what was going on in this movie at all.

I also really didn't like Timothy Olyphant. Especially his voice. Everybody else in the movie seemed to have some kind of foreign accent (either sort of Russian or sort of British), but he sounded just so frigging American.

If it had been, say, Jason Statham, the movie might have been bearable. I still would have been confused, but I find the Stath strangely comforting. I heard Vin Diesel was considered for that role. Vin! I love Vin. Dammit, he should've been in it.

All that being said, I thought the movie looked great, had some good performances (I did think Gary Oldman would've pwnd Henry Ian Cusick's role, like a Russian version of Drexl - I dunno, that kinda bugged me) and I dug the music. The action scenes were really well done and the movie had a certain degree of awesomeness.

So, as far as confusing/frustrating action VG adaptations go, this was was actually pretty good. It was entertaining, leastways.

END

Directed by: Xavier Gens. Written by: Skip Woods based on some video game. Starring: Timothy Olyphant, Dougray Scott, Olga Kurylenko, Robert Knepper, Ulrich Thompson, Michael Offei, Henry Ian Cusick, James Faulkner.