Hitman

We haven’t had time to watch many movies lately, but we got a chance to watch this one over the weekend. It’s based on a video game, so you can expect lots of action. After an opening that’s extremely reminiscent of the DARK ANGEL TV series (little kids having their heads shaved and barcodes tattooed on them, intensive martial arts training, being held prisoner in a snowy compound . . . I mean, come on, it’s the exact same thing!), we jump ahead and find out that those kids are being raised to be professional assassins who work for a mysterious organization known only as (you guessed it) “The Organization”. One of them who grows up to be known only as Agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant, who played Seth Bullock on DEADWOOD) is in Russia to carry out an assignment when he’s set up and betrayed by his own employers. That causes him to turn on The Organization and go after them to find out who’s responsible for double-crossing him.

The plot’s pretty hard to follow, although I’m fairly sure it does all make sense of a sort in the end. Also, I kept asking myself why in the world a bunch of professional assassins who work for some super-secret organization would walk around with their heads shaved and barcodes tattooed on them. Not exactly inconspicuous, is it? But a movie like this isn’t really about making sense. It’s about staging bloody, over-the-top action sequences and looking cool, and HITMAN succeeds pretty well on both those counts. Olyphant does a pretty good job as Agent 47, in a part that doesn’t require him to say much, and the supporting cast is okay. There’s a little too much quick-cut editing in the action scenes for my taste, but I’ve seen worse. And as gory as it is, it’s not as gory as it could have been. There’s actually a little restraint here and there.

HITMAN is pretty much a live-action cartoon, but there are touches of humor here and there and it moves fast. Overall, I enjoyed it and thought it succeeded in what it set out to do. I don’t ask much more than that from a movie.