HITMAN: AGENT 47 (2015) **

Hey, remember when they made that movie from that video game Hitman?  I had to try really hard to remember too.  I think all I remember was that I spent the whole movie wishing they had got Jason Statham to play Hitman instead of the miscast Timothy Olyphant, and that pains me to say, seeing how much I like Timothy Olyphant.  It really said something about the film that it could take a great actor like Timothy Olyphant and make him feel like he wasn’t right for the role.   

So, here’s this reboot they made a few years ago.  They couldn’t get Statham this time either, so I’m not sure why they even bothered.  I mean, the role of the Hitman is nothing more than a bald badass who shoots people.  It’s a tailor-made vehicle for Statham, and yet Hollywood refuses to cast him in the role.  What gives? 

Anyway, this time around, they got Rupert Friend, an actor I am not familiar with to play Hitman.  He doesn’t have much in the way of screen presence and he doesn’t look all that intimidating either.  (He sort of resembles a bald Orlando Bloom trying to do long division.)  We also got Spock Lite from the J.J. Trek movies as the nice guy who’s obviously a not-so nice guy.   

The influence here seems to be the Bourne movies.  While there are some touches of the shaky-cam aesthetic that hamstrung that series, the action was a lot crisper than I was anticipating/dreading.  That’s not to say it was great, but it got the job done more or less.   

Friend isn’t bad while essaying the loneliness and solitude that comes with the territory of being a Hitman.  The one scene that really stood out to me was when he sat in the dark and stared unblinkingly at his laptop as it looked for his next target.  Not only did it brilliantly show the isolation and single-mindedness of the character, it helped make him sympathetic in the audience’s eyes.  As someone who depends on his laptop to write his reviews and seeing how it has been constantly on the fritz for the last few months, I certainly identified with the idea of a character who cannot perform the only task he is good at because he is at the mercy of technology.  This scene alone made Agent 47 better than the original in my eyes.   

The plot, such as it is, follows Hitman as he is in pursuit of a woman with psychic abilities (Hannah Ware) who can predict what’s going to happen in the movie before it happens.  It’s fitting that she is the audience substitute because we can predict just about everything in the movie before it happens too.  Sure, the story is predictable, but the action is slightly better than average.  While it’s nothing that will knock your socks off, it’s certainly watchable.  What’s more, it contains a gun-punching sequence, and if you know me by now, you know I love it when a guy punches another guy with a gun while simultaneously shooting him.  So, it has that going for it.