Taking Aim at Hitman, the Movie

The timing was perfect: it was late at night, I had a couple hours to kill, and there was nothing on T.V. There it sat: a DVD copy of Hitman(2007), starring Timothy Olyphant and Olga Kurylenko. The cover was inscribed with the review, "exactly how a game adaptation should be done." Wicked, I thought, I want to see how a video game adaptation should be done.

I don't know if Hitman is how a video game adaptation should be done, but it certainly isn't how a film should. What transpired was 90 minutes of cliches, blatant rip-offs, sleek, stylish, substance-lacking cinematography, nonexistant storylines, implausible action sequences, ridiculous dialogue, thorny exposition, and a viewer rubbing his head wondering who the hell wrote that review.

But this isn't just a movie review of a 2007 dud. This is the flashpoint where everything wrong with most contemporary movies(please note: I said most, not all) comes together to be epitomized by this one. Though art is subjective and one man's trash can be another man's treasure, I think it's pretty solid to say Hitman is crap. Like most movies made post-Pulp Fiction, its main concern is looking sleek and slow-mo'ing to death gunfight scenes. Am I the only person left who doesn't care how cool a shooting sequence looks if it doesn't have a storyline behind it? If I wanted to see Hard-Boiled meets The Matrix I'll go watch Hard-Boiled and The Matrix, both of which actually had stories.

Hitman, in particular, like most of its digital relatives made in the 2000's, devotes too much time and effort being sexy. There is absolutely no substance in story, and it moves so quickly with its smash cuts, flash cuts, and digital dissolves that it has no chance of building any character arcs or tension. The climax itself is so anti-climactic I saw they had included an "alternate ending" in the Special Features section. I didn't watch it.

Throughout the film, I also kept seeing scenes that didn't just look derivative of other movies, they looked like complete plagerisms. Fight scenes echoed of Jackie Chan jumping through openings, love/gun scenes stank to high heaven of The Transporter, the anti-climactic climax looked like it was stolen from True Lies, digitally re-mastered then played in slow-mo, and in one scene where protaganist "Agent 47" is captured and spoken to via a police car's rear-view mirror-- I thought I was watching Kevin Spacey's creepy "John Doe" eyes from Se7en. I won't even get started on how many "character enters/character shoots up the place/character exits" scenes were done in Reservoir Dogs/Goodfellas slow-mo fashion.

What happened to movies? Sure, there were crappers back in the 80's and 90's, but at least they were original. Somewhere between the creation of American Pie, Charlie's Angels, and Britney Spears, we strapped on a pair of skis and Lindsey Vonn'ed our way down the slippery slope. Charlie's Angels should've been a character story about three women with mysterious pasts, trained as government operatives and exploring their hidden traumas as they find their own reasons to take on dangerous assignments. Instead it was a live-action CGI cartoon, the equivalent of 1,000 empty calories and a harbinger of things to come. What the hell is a McG, anyway?

Look at Daredevil and Spiderman as well. If you knew nothing of superhero movies prior to these you'd think they were pretty good. But if you knew anything about everything you'd know there was a movie called Superman starring Christopher Reeve, which was later somewhat "re-made" into the Superman you probably last saw. The original Superman with Reeve won Academy Awards. It starred Marlon Brando. When was the last time you heard a comic-book superhero movie winning an Oscar? Back then movies had character stories, emotionality, and moved at a pace dictated by storyline. No one back-flipped out of an exploding car onto a helicopter while drop-kicking the pilot out the door... in slow-mo. Nowadays, it seems movies are written around conceptualized scenes.

If it were up to me, we'd start taking the classics and re-making them scene by scene, using contemporary actors who resemble the original actors, and shooting them identically to the originals. Even better would be to just re-release the originals. Films like Apocalypse Now, Superman, Deliverance, True Lies, Reservoir Dogs, even Ghostbusters. Everyone seems to have forgotten about them and how to develop a story. And as for that quote on the DVD cover of Hitman, it turns out it was written by some generic website/online gaming magazine. If this is how video games should be adapted into movies, maybe we shouldn't.