Hitman (Blu-ray Disc, 2009, 2-Disc Set, Unrated)

Based on the video game franchise of the same title, “Hitman” exploits every action-flick cliché imaginable and still manages to be dull. It’s bang, boom, blah — action movies for bored dummies.

A strangely, at times ridiculously, miscast Timothy Olyphant stars as the titular contract killer, who has been raised by some monastic-looking male order to travel the world in bloody business class, from Africa to Europe to Russia with hate. He’s a globe-trotting unholy man, a messianic messenger of murder. He’s also bald, has a bar code tattooed on the back of his head and is known only as 47. Women leave him cold (if vaguely rattled), which probably comes as a relief to the movie’s presumptive adolescent male target audience.

There’s a hodgepodge story from the screenwriter Skip Woods, though its details are sufficiently uninteresting to the director, Xavier Gens, as to make them uninteresting to anyone watching (or reading about) this mess. In “Hitman,” Mr. Gens, whose feature debut, “Frontière(s),” earned legitimacy by playing at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival, lavishes his attention on blowing stuff up, including dozens upon dozens of people. Life is always cheap in the exploitation racket, but it’s still tiresome watching one after another anonymous extra get a sizable hole blown through his body, to watch movie blood spray like water amid chunks of fake body bits, especially when there’s no story to speak of, no decent acting, no wit, no point.



Well, there is a point, which is to reel an audience in with an entertaining spectacle of death. In this regard, Mr. Gens fails, despite owing a visual and thematic debt to Luc Besson, whose company helped produce this junk. There’s loads of noisy violence and R-rated gore in “Hitman,” along with the regulation female nudity (via Olga Kurylenko), but these flashy parts never cohere or gather momentum.

Rather, Mr. Olyphant’s robotic assassin moves through corridors in effective mimicry of a familiar video game visual strategy, pausing every so often to peer through a gun scope, stare at the pulsing lights on his laptop or brutally dispatch one more generic human obstacle. On occasion, the story shifts to Dougray Scott, whose indifferent turn as an Interpol agent chasing after 47 nicely mirrored my own reaction to the on-screen din

OVERALL
7/10

I LOVE THE SERIES OF THE VISEO GAME AS PER MY REVIEW AND I WOULD SAY THAT THIS IS A MUST SEE MOVIE FOR ALL THE HITMAN FANS..IF YOU HAVE NOT PLAYED THE GAME THAN I SAY RENT THIS OR RENT THE GAME!

Another movie based on a popular video game. Hmmmm...wellll, it's probably gonna be dull and teditious like the others. Ohh waait a minute, this is a pretty good movie! Timothy Olyphant from HBO's Deadwood is Agent 47, a hitman who gets his assignment from a unseen organization provided by a voice named Diana. 47 is pursed by an Interpol agent (Dougray Scott) and also unlike the video game 47 doesnt change into disguises ususally taken from the person he did or not kill.

The Blu-Ray version was cooooool; it had a lot more extras than the original DVD. This was a great movie based on a video game with T. Olyphant delivering the goods on Agent 47. Hope the sequel is just as good!

Hitman was an enjoyable movie with references throughout towards to the video game series on which it is based on. They picked a good one (Timothy Olyphant-Scream 2, Live Free or Die Hard) to play the title character and he does so with style but also a fierceness as well. He dispatches any and all that come his way or end up and his already dead marks. From hand to hand combat, guns, sword fights with others like him from the Organization that trained, fed, clothed and made them into the powerful yet deadly freelance agents they are.

It is touched on his background with the organization but hope it might be expanded on in a future movie. Entertaining, action packed and loaded with violence add a little bit of storyline and you have a fun and far more entertaining movie than i thought it could be. Usually i'm not too hyped over video games made into movies, but Hitman isn't like that at all.

If you like the close combat slash mission impossible type movies this is it.
A strangely, at times ridiculously, miscast Timothy Olyphant stars as the titular contract killer, who has been raised by some monastic-looking male order to travel the world in bloody business class, from Africa to Europe to Russia with hate. He’s a globe-trotting unholy man, a messianic messenger of murder. He’s also bald, has a bar code tattooed on the back of his head and is known only as 47. Women leave him cold (if vaguely rattled), which probably comes as a relief to the movie’s presumptive adolescent male target audience.

47 has his own insignia. The symbol appears in Hitman: Codename 47 on the gates of Ort-Meyer's asylum, throughout his laboratory and is formed by Ort-Meyer's pool of blood when 47 kills him at the end of the game. It also appears in Hitman: Contracts on the floor of the cloning lab, this time as though it is the actual floor design, as well as on Ort-Meyer's belt buckle.

The symbol is engraved on the handles of his custom AMT Hardballer pistols. It is also found on 47's equipment such as his laptop, briefcase and cell phone. In Silent Assassin it can be seen on the stained glass windows at the Gontranno sanctuary; however, this is just an easter egg. In the film, 47 wears a pair of silver cufflinks with his insignia enameled in red.

Also, in some of the yellow books laying around in the first level of Blood Money it can be seen in a large black stencil-like pattern. One example is by the door that is picked open with a shotgun nearby.