THE video game adaptation is such a grisly genre that if any film fitting the description fails to induce fits, vomiting or comas it must be considered a partial triumph. Hitman is such a movie.
As ever with these beasts, it features camera moves whose eccentricity reveals their origins in the source material, and it asks its actors to exert more energy on strutting than acting. Still, the film features some nice footage of Saint Petersburg and, by employing Deadwood's Timothy Olyphant, allows a charismatic actor room to exercise the least sophisticated aspects of his talent. Hitman is a bad film, but nobody who has sat through Super Mario Brothers will think it the worst they've ever seen.
Olyphant's bald automaton, introduced via a slick title sequence that features the unlikely strains of Ave Maria, is one of a batch of pre-programmed killers developed by some mysterious organisation for some mysterious purpose. When a Russian politician appears to survive a shot to the head, 47 - for it is he - takes it as an affront to his professionalism and sets out to unravel the conspiracy that spared his target the grave. A great deal of nonsense involving misused waifs, hairy gunrunners and ventilated crania ensues.
The European journeymen who threw Hitman together have clearly watched the Bourne films, but their failure to order their own chaos tells us that they paid little attention to that
series' lessons on the dynamics of cinema violence. The plot makes a kind of sense. But one is no more inclined to care about the characters' peril than one was to mourn the frequent deaths of Pac-Man.
