Hitman (2007)

[BayernBoz]

Me too, got the whole day planned out tomorrow and it revolves around seeing this movie...I'm getting wet.

 

[Help?]

I hear bad reviews about it. One guy on the Canadian news channel gave it a 1/5.

 

[Tom]

Come on it's a game-movie, it'll be ****.

 

[Áļéאָ]

haha, spot-on

 

[Help?]

Yeah, you are probably right. But i just want that movie to do well.

 

[Hakeem]

Doom was great! [No Smileys]

 

[Help?]

Saw it today for free. Thanks to the awesomeness of Cineplex movie card promotion that gives free ticket and doesn't even check for ID, so i could make 10-20 accounts for 10-20 free movies, if i really wanted too.


The movie itself was pretty sweet. Some funny moments some great moments. Some people won't like it, but i thought they captured the typical points from the game pretty well. Funny moment happened, when he jumped into an apartment through the window, where kids were playing a video game, then once he turned his head to them, they showed him looking at the kids playing Hitman 3 lol.
He also had a great way in dealing with women: "shut up or i put you back in the trunk". The hero of wife-beaters.
Some sick action in all of this, we some nice fights. Robert Knepper from Prison Break was in there playing a russian guy, speaking english with russian accent and speaking russian with english accent.
I wasn't too sure about Olyphant at the start, but he fit in for the role pretty well actually, i wouldn't mind having a sequel for this.

 

[BayernBoz]

^spot on. I for one, ruined it for myself a bit by getting too excited about it. It was a good film though, except for maybe the very last shot, it looks too cartoonish (Batman style). Everything else was good, and that russian chick is hot, in a trashy kind of way. Oh and Olyphant's run is a bit San Francisco-ish....gay.

 

[Bonzi]

When it comes to anything Russian the movie is as inaccurate as it can be (:/)

 

[King]

BOriiiiiiiiiiingggggggggggggggg!!!!!!!

 

[Ev0la]

This must have been the ****tiest movie I have ever seen in quite a while.

 

[MikeyM]

I think that's the major point with videogame movies. You are involved with the outcome of a video game. You have to watch a movie - that's the crucial difference. The reason Hitman worked as a game was exactly that.

 

[Tom]

Come on it's a game-movie, it'll be ****.

Twenty eight days later and voila, i'm right. Tosh.

Hitman has some serious issues as a movie, i'll start with the minor ones leading up to the big, face-hitting one. Firstly, there are gaping holes in the plot all over the place, an assassin meant to murder people without being spotted... who has a shaven head and a barcode wrapped around his skull, but of course. Bourne showed us how this kind of movie should be done, and it wasnt with a razor and some shaving cream.

Secondly, the movie moves way too fast for any real form of emotional sympathy for either the lead lady or, perhaps more worryingly, the hitman himself. This is a problem, it's a real problem, as the entire premise of the movie is based around him accepting who he is, and severing the ties that bind him to his past. If we don't care about him, then, well, who cares?

Thirdly, the script is nothing short of woeful, and i mean, woeful. You know it's bad when in a cheesy movie even one-liners fail to work in spectacular fashion, in fact, that leads onto my fourth point, the acting. Up to now i've never seen Dougray Scott bad in a film, but after watching this for an hour and half, i can rest easy having being able to now tick that box. No-one is good in this movie, the accents are all off, all of them.

Finally, the direction, the biggest problem. I always say a movie can be saved by good direction, however bad the acting/dialogue/narrative. This, is terrible. Xavier Gens has, to my knowledge at least, never directed another movie in his life, it looks like the kind of dude who probably loved the computer game, had some contacts in the industry and "made it happen". The 'fight scenes' are fine, we get the impression that Agent 47 knows what he's doing and that, despite the self-expressive training montage we get at the start of the film anyway (somewhat of a slap-in-the-face thirty second guide into the birth of a killer), he really is one hell of a mecenary. No no, this film is let down by the fact Gens hasnt a clue how to direct an emotional scene, no wait, make that any scene that isnt action. Take any form of dialogue, he constantly switches between POV shots to over the shoulder shots, somehow attempting to mirror the original game in some peverse way. All this accomplishes is confusing the audience, and more than anything, not engaging us. It's like zooming, zooming in films is a no-no. Why? Because the human eye can't zoom. Nor can the human eye flip from inside someones skull to outside it. Simple things Gens, simple things.

A terrible film, with no redeeming qualities.

N.B - Vin Diesel was an Exec Producer on this, enough said? I think so.