Hitman: Agent 47 – Film Review V2.0 by C.K. MacNamara

Director: Aleksander Bach

Writers: Skip Woods, Michael Finch

Starring: Rupert Friensd, Hannah Ware, Zachary Quinto

Dull, sterile and unable to measure up to the already threadbare concept of the game it’s based on, comes Hitman: Agent 47, a big Hollywood flop as mass produced and without personality as its protagonist. Helmed by debut darling Alexander Bach, this for lack of a better word ‘movie’ attempts a cinematic adaptation of a first-draft fanfiction of the Hitman videogame.

Scraped together with a loose clutter of content from other films and product placement, the film attempts to clumsily imitate and outright plagarise its way to what amounts to a budgetary mystery. What hole the $35 million budget vanished down is unknown, but it didn’t go into the film.

The plot hinges on hipster outcast Katia and her angsty adventure to find her lost father, vanished from his job as evil head of a super-soldier biogenetics program due to unforeseen ethical issues his job title failed to alert him to. His former employers, a mysterious enterprise known only as the Syndicate (can we collectively agree on a new name for stereotypical criminal organisation) now seek to use his daughter to flush out the rogue researcher before the equally mysterious Agent 47 reaches her.

Trapped in the middle and armed with only a backpacker’s map and psychic abilities (what?) Katia uses her powers to whitewash away plot holes and lack of production values through constant ‘visions’ – jarring, low resolution first-person footage filmed through a shaky handheld camera and overlaid with a Vaseline filter.

Perhaps this cinematic roadkill is in fact an enormous meta joke on the power fantasy of the Hitman games themselves; a story about the overlooked secondary characters and their futile attempts to survive the invincible Agent 47 player character. Sadly no, the performances are genuine and the writing shamelessly unaware.

Rupert Friend manages even less personality as Agent 47 than his game counterpart, a character deliberately written to have a minimum of emotion and dialogue. His performance devolves into a murmuring two-tone character, switching exclusively between shooting and reflecting sunlight off his bald head.

Desperately attempting to mimic competent predecessors and fluff out its lack of substance behind a haze of cheap CGI, Hitman: Agent 47 removes the player involvement and offers nothing in return, effectively amounting to watching someone else play a videogame, and that’s never fun.