An intended reboot of 2007’s Hitman, itself adapted from the eponymous video game, Hitman: Agent 47 trades Timothy Olyphant for Rupert Friend of TV’s Homeland to fill the title role of the assassin in the Italian wool suit. Bad move, 20th Century Fox — with a distracting pointy bump, he looks even stranger with a shaved head than Olyphant. Friend, despite his last name, has a fraction of the charisma as well. Not that much magnetism is called for when you’re playing a killing machine programmed to possess zero emotions, but enough to get viewers partially invested in the exploding spectacle would be nice.
The UPC-coded Agent 47 spends the film as a human variation on Arnold Schwarzenegger’s good-guy Terminator robot, terrifying a beautiful woman until she learns he’s actually around to protect her. She is Katia (Hannah Ware, Shame); she has ESP, which proves confounding for her own sanity; and she is searching for her orchid-loving, cancer-ridden father (Ciarán Hinds, TV’s Game of Thrones), for reasons that are fairly convoluted, even for a tale rather thin on story. More important than who our two leads are seeking is who is seeking them, with intent to kill: Zachary Quinto basically reprising his villainous Sylar character from TV’s Heroes, but with the added benefit of subdermal body armor to make him bulletproof. That enhancement hardly stops Agent 47 from trying to shoot him anyway.
You know your action film is in trouble when the aural appearance of the Wilhelm scream incites more passion in the viewer than any of the stunts. Same goes for when said viewer is more interested in finding out where a scene was shot (Singapore’s Gardens by the Bay) than what is happening in it. The plot doesn’t hold up to scrutiny of logic, but it’s not supposed to, as this is not that type of movie; this is the type of movie where an on-the-run character lives in a virtual hovel, with an entire wall covered by a map littered with newspaper clippings, photographs and thumbtacks to hold the string criss-crossing this way and that. Making his directorial debut, Polish filmmaker Aleksander Bach delivers Hitman: Agent 47 in the tidy facade of a magazine layout highlighting homes unattainable to members of your tax bracket, meaning it looks clean to the point of sterility, yet houses no soul. —Rod Lott