Hitman: Agent 47 (2015)

A Review in Film - 26/09/2017

Hitman: Agent 47
2015
Dir: Aleksander Bach

Mild spoilers. But lets be real, you aren’t gonna watch it.

Landing hot and fresh onto Netflix is the mind-meltingly shit Hitman: Agent 47, based on the popular and critically received video game series Hitman by IO Interactive; and as Hollywood loves to do with well-established source material, bone it completely through the window.

Fans of the game, of which I am one, will know that the character of the Hitman is a cold and calculated man, oftentimes stalking his prey and waiting for the correct moment to assassinate his target in (usually) the cleanest and least conspicuous way possible. Many times, Agent 47 (the protagonist) will have to rid a few henchmen and hide the bodies and/or take on their clothes so as to blend into the crowds to get to the mark unassumed. Nothing is done without thought.
Yet Hollywood’s Hitman: Agent 47 shows us the protagonist to be a bombastically over-the-top one-man army that could’ve been any unthought-out action hero with a gun.

Because fuck turning around



Somewhere between the face-slappingly awful action scenes was a storyline involving some girl trying to find her dad while others are also trying to find him. I don’t know why anyone wanted to find him nor does the movie tell us. Maybe I missed the explanation because my brain was trying to understand the myriad of unbridled stupidity that happens from scene to scene.

Stupidity such as;


  • Goons reacting to being shot before actually being shotSuper assassin Agent 47 choosing a bright red top-of-the-line Audi as his secret mission car when arriving covertly in Singapore

  • Agent 47, who is being hunted by the super-assassin-making organisation that created him or whatever, sleeping in a chair right next to a floor-to-ceiling window with no curtains in a hotel with the lights on

  • Agent 47’s accent changing from American, to English, to Russian all in one sentence all the time, and that’s not in any spy/undercover context 

  • The big cheese at the American embassy, upon interrogating a wilfully captured Agent 47 who was armed to the actual tits, brings in 47’s sniper rifle and loads it to try and threaten answers out of him. And if that wasn’t breaking all manner of protocols, 47 kicks the table up causing the rifle to discharge, shooting his handcuffs off so he’s free to cause mayhem
 
  • Heavily armed/hugely armoured soldiers sent to kill Agent 47 get hit in the arm or chest with a single bullet from a handgun and die straight away as if their armour was actually made for movie filming purposes only
 
  • Agent 47’s laptop bleeps and bloops like R2D2 beatboxing when running a scanning program
 
  • Agent 47’s taking his handguns out of his jacket holster and placing them beside him as he sleeps (upright in that chair), only for the idiot he’s trying to protect to dismantle them because she ‘can’t sleep’ right before a bunch of goons break down the door. Granted she didn’t know about the goons; but still I was hoping she’d get kicked through a wall by anyone as a wakeup call to common manners
 
  • The good guy dad everyone wanted a piece of decided to blow himself and the main villain up in a villainous helicopter to ‘save the day’, except he did it over a densely populated city

It seemed to me that absolutely nobody bar the lead female actor could be bothered with acting properly, and even then she acted like she wasn’t being paid enough to be there. Agent 47 spent the entire movie with the look of a man mirroring the faces of lifelong Hitman fans watching this film shit on their beloved franchise – upset and soul-brokenly confused.
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Source material/story/character development? What source material/story/character development?