Hitman
There have been plenty of movies adapted from video games before, but "Hitman" may be the first one that actually feels like a computer wrote and directed it.
A spinoff of Eidos Interactive's successful third-person shooter series, in which a bald, black-suited assassin named Agent 47 calmly murders his way up a nefarious chain of command, the movie is almost completely generic - a Jason Bourne film with all the individual markings filed off. It moves fast and offers plenty of blam-blam without any reason why we should care.
Perhaps the problem is that the hero looks like Redi Kilowatt disguised as one of the Men in Black. Trained from childhood by the shadowy Organization, Agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant) is not only shaved bald but has a Universal Product Code tattooed on the back of his head, the better to keep tabs on his freshness date, I guess. All the Organization's killer elite look the same. These guys don't exactly blend.
"Hitman" is the sort of movie that gives us datelines like "London . . . England," just in case the target audience isn't sure where London is. Most of the action takes place in St. Petersburg (. . . Russia), where 47 has been dispatched to assassinate Federation president Mikhail Belicoff (Ulrich Thomsen). The hit goes awry and 47 is scheduled for extinction next. All that stands between him and the loss of his benefits package is Nika (Olga Kurylenko), Belicoff's slatternly mistress. A love interest? Perhaps, although 47's idea of romantic chitchat is "Shut up, or I'll put you back in the trunk."
"Hitman" might have worked as a tough, nihilistic B-movie about a soulless killer learning how to feel. Kurylenko has a sleazy charisma - 1950s film noir buffs will understand when I say she gives good Marie Windsor - and Dougray Scott gets a few nice scenes as the Interpol cop on 47's tail. Under Xavier Gens's direction, the punch-ups are over-edited but effective, and there's a four-way sword fight in a cramped train compartment that's fairly impressive, if nowhere near as lunatic as what Tarantino might have made of it.
The problem with "Hitman," aside from its near-total predictability, is the central miscasting. Olyphant just doesn't have the inarguable dramatic heft for this kind of role: He's too young, too high-voiced, with eyes that quiver too early in the game. The part needs a Jason Statham or Clive Owen - someone whose nihilism has a bottom and some flavors to it, like a good Scotch. Olyphant, by contrast, seems like a boy sent to do a man's work. If this actually were a video game, he'd be toast before Level Two, and you'd be throwing your joystick across the room in disgust.
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