Just some quick thoughts on some flicks I saw on DVD this weekend. By the nature of such viewings (especially since I got them from the library, and they were thus free), I was rather less picky than I am when seeing films in a theater, so be aware.
First I watched Hitman, which starred Tim Olyphant of Deadwood. I dearly love that show, and Olyphant can communicate deep and barely repressed rage to a rare degree. However, he’s not a great actor sans great writing (unlike his co-star Ian McShane), so here he’s more serviceable. On the other hand, there’s not much an actor could do with this movie, which was amusingly stupid, even for a film based on a video game.
The titular hitman is 47 (“Where I come from, we don’t get names” he portentiously declares, one of the film’s inadvertently hilarious lines), a “ghost” of an assassin who’s been hunted over the last three years by an in intrepid Interpol agent played by Dougray “I was almost Wolverine” Scott. Scott’s best line occurs when his hunt for 47 brings him into contact with a shady Russian spook. This is right after an assassination attempt on the Russian president, and Scott asks the guy something like “Why’re the Russian secret police interested in this?” It also turns out that that teams of machine-gun carrying CIA agents run around publically intercepting Interpol agents in Moscow, too, with nobody finding it worthy of much mention.
The funniest part of the film is that “ghost” assassin 47 is a bald guy in a black suit and tie with a barcode prominently tattoed on the back of his head, a fact that no one ever mentions. In fact, 47–as his number suggests–is only of a big group of such assassins, all of whom are bald and wear black suits and ties and have barcodes prominently engraved on the back of their heads. None of them even bother to wear hats, and yet nobody ever notices all these guys in the vicinity of all these high-profile assassinations. Scott has been on 47’s tail for three years, and yet he never mentions 47th’s distinctive look, and apparently is unaware of it until he finally sees the guy. (By the way, when 47 eventually decides to break off from the group, his new independence is marked by his switching from a black tie to a red one.)
Despite their not very ninja-y trademark look, the group remains so covert that it’s only known as “The Organization” and, we are told, “Nobody even knows it exists.” Actually, I’m pretty sure the guys IN the group know it exists, but anyway.
Every movie (certainly modern ones) about the shadowy world of assassins revolves around three plots: An assassin is given an assignment but finds himself betrayed by his client. An assassin loses his objectivity and decides not to kill whatever incredibly admirable world figure he’s been assigned to assassinate. An assassin decides not to kill his target because he falls in love with her. Sometimes the plot incorporates all three of those clichés. Here it’s mostly number one and number three.
Said woman is played by actress Olga Kurylenko, who graduated to the lead female role in the recent Bond flick Quantum of Solace. In this film she has a couple of nude scenes (at least on the unrated DVD), and I have to say, “Wow.”
I can’t suggest watching the film just on that basis, but it doesn’t hurt any. I will say that her burgeoning relationship with 47 is studiously unbelievable even for this sort of thing. Their big issue is that 47 is highly sexually repressed (he was raised since a pup to be a super-assassin for the Vatican, if I was following things), a fact the film clearly finds a lot more strange than the fact that he kills hundreds of people at the drop of a hat.
Probably the biggest problem is that the action is kind of clunky and more ridiculous than ‘cool,’ especially a ludicrous ‘honor’ sword fight between 47 and three of his ex-brethren. The film’s greatest strength, which makes it sort of watchable in that “hey, it’s a rental” fashion, is that it’s a pleasingly short 90 minutes. Another twenty minutes and this might have been an eye-gouger, but luckily it’s pithy enough that the more laughable dumbness and the occasionally undraped Ms. Kurylenko get us through. By the way, she also starred in the recent Max Payne, which is ten minutes longer than this and thus probably half as watchable, at best.
Hmm, that ran longer than I thought it would. (I know, it’s shocking.) More on the rest of the stuff later.
