Hitman: Agent 47 (5/10)

by Tony Medley

Runtime 96 minutes.

Not for children.

This is little more than a violent video game made into a movie with a ludicrous story to try to justify all the mayhem. The entire environment in which the characters live is sheer fantasy, a social order beyond credibility. Actually the environments in real video games, goofy as they are, are more believable than the world this movie inhabits. The entire environment in which these people live doesn’t exist anywhere on the planet. But the special effects are pretty good and the action is nonstop.

I’m not quite sure what the purpose of this movie is except violence and plot holes. For every person killed (in the hundreds) there is at least one plot hole, so I stopped counting.

Agent 47 (Rupert Friend) is a genetically engineered killing machine, totally emotionless, who kills relentlessly and without feeling. Katia (Angela Ware) is a mysterious young woman who is looking for someone but is the target of lots of people. She gets involved with John Smith (Zachary Quinto) who is apparently the only person in the world who knows more about her than she knows about herself (which isn’t very much) and is defending her against Agent 47. That’s the way it starts but it gets more involved with lots of twists and turns. Unfortunately, the total unbelievability of the entire thing is its undoing.

The action is good and chase movies are generally captivating, but the unrealistic scenes (you know the script; the bad guys shoot automatic weapons with thousands of bullets spraying all over everything that never hit the good guys and the good guys shoot only semi-automatic hand guns but for every bullet, there’s a dead body; please!) bring about its undoing and rob the film of the tension needed.

There will come a time when these films will stop bringing in money because they are so overdone, and only then will they stop being made.