Tom;2440778 said:
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.