Hitman

Rating: Way better than most based-on-video-games films.
Important to know: The lead female goes topless in several scenes.
For the Gamer Chicks: The film's director didn't consult much with the game creators. This is a good thing.

I am trying to remember the last movie I watched that was based on a video game. It was either Tomb Raider II: Cradle of Life, or DOOM. The former was fun but ridiculous, the latter fun but horrible. That is often the fate of movies based on games. They're never exactly good movies. Some try too hard to get away from their game roots and find there's not much left, some try to recreate the gaming experience, and though the results are amusing (DOOM has a first-person-shooter sequence) they never really work.

Hitman manages to be an entertaining movie, and a good one. I do not know how faithful it is to the games it's based on beyond the signature bald-head-with-barcode appearance of the protagonist, named 47, but it's a good movie. Perhaps I need to rephrase: it's a good action movie.

The plot is simple. 47 (Timothy Olyphant) is an assassin hired to kill someone. He does his job, only to find himself in the middle of a conspiracy designed to totally screw him over. His own people are after him (equally bald and bar-coded), the Russian intelligence agency is after him, and one of those dogged Interpol agents (Dougray Scott) just won't leave him alone. Thrown in to complicate his life is Nika, a Russian prostitute who is also marked for death.

Here the movie remains faithful to the game. Game 47 is not a ladies man. In fact, he's been raised to be mostly asexual, so he doesn't really notice women. This means movie 47 is stuck with this woman who walks around topless (She's European!) and at one point hits on him mercilessly, and all it does is make him vastly uncomfortable (how he gets out of her hitting on him is one of the funniest things I have ever seen).

The interaction between 47 and Nika is one of the best parts of the film, if for no other reason than every scene where they are together leads to something amusing. 47 does not know how to talk to women, so he's hilarious without meaning to be. The comedy is a surprise, because it's actually funny. Nika also acts as a stimulus for 47 to start questioning his life. The audience can see that he is a broken human, but it isn't until he runs up against someone equally as damaged that he notices it himself. There's a schmaltzy note toward the end of the film, but I bought their connection, broken people can always find each other.

One truly high point of the film is it does not over-explain itself. 47 works for The Company (one day it will be forbidden to name shadowy organizations generic things like that), which evidently does a lot of freelance killing. We meet other agents, but the Company itself is never defined. No one ever comes right out and explains what the conspiracy is, but if you've been watching the movie, it's not hard to understand.

What is a little silly is that 47 is described as being the best there is. Why do people always try to screw with the "best" person? Why not send in someone who's not as good and have your "best" guy do the clean-up? But this is an action film trope, and I won't blame it on the game.

Olyphant sells every scene, from tense conversations to hand-to-hand combat. Where most actors might play him as wooden, Olyphant gives 47 flexibility. He's feeling something, and it shows, but the audience is never sure what it is. That makes him more than a little scary.

The film opens and closes with a conversation about being a good man and also being a killer. The question asked at the beginning is answered quite well at the end, though whether or not 47 is a good man is left for the audience to decide.