Hitman: Agent 47 opens by explaining the history of its subject. Back in 1967, genetic experiments were performed for the purpose of creating perfect assassins. These experiments produced the Agents, a series of numerically-named humans with enhanced abilities. When the program was shut down, the scientist in charge of the experiments went into hiding. The narration then explains that since then, certain organizations have been on the lookout for the said scientist, hoping to use him to replicate the results of his original experiments.
In present day, the search has led the multinational corporation Syndicate International to Katia (Hannah Ware), a young woman obsessed with finding someone for reasons she can't quite explain. Agent 47 (Rupert Friend), one of the products if the original experiments, is also looking for Katia. Unbeknownst to the young woman, she and the assassin share a common origin, and she is the key to finding the missing scientist. The two team up against the Syndicate to foil their plans to build an army of genetically modified killers.
The movie is structured awkwardly, the script written in a way that allows for several reversals in the story. What is presumably meant to add intrigue to the story mostly results in it feeling incoherent. The conceit has the characters making strange decisions, forgoing the most obvious solutions to problems in order to facilitate the twists further down the line. Too much of this film involves the lead character withholding his plans from people who would benefit from knowing them. He's often acting against his own self-interest, and so it feels like he only ever succeeds because his enemies are even dumber than him.
The film makes it out like he’s outsmarting everyone, but there isn’t much intelligence to any of this. He heads into dangerous situations and basically gets out of them simply because he’s vaguely superior. The film probably didn't need to be smart, but it could have been more straightforward. There's little to gain from hiding the true motivations of the main character. It's difficult to root for characters when you don't know why they're doing anything. The film seems to think that it's enough that he's the coolest guy in the room. But that just isn't the case.
The film doesn't make him look very cool at all. A lot of this has to do with the direction. The action feels jumpy and disjointed, much of it shot too close to register. The gunfights are aggressively edited, cutting quickly between shooter and target with little sense of the geography of the location. It gets boring really quickly, and it doesn't really reflect the specific kind of violence that's found in the video games. The acting isn't great, but it's tough to blame the actors. This script is just a load of pointless subterfuge. Still, Hannah Ware does make it difficult to care about her character, the actress somehow projecting less charisma than her co-star, who is playing an outright emotionless character.
Most people probably aren't heading into Hitman: Agent 47 hoping that it tells a complex, thematically rich story. They're just hoping that the film delivers on the action. But the violence here is as incoherent as everything else, the jumpy, overly kinetic treatment obscuring the impact of the action. And that's the real failure here. The film makes the action feel tedious, the camerawork making most of it tiring to witness. At the very end, the film teases the possibility of further installments down the line. But if these films continue to take this same path, then it just isn’t worth the trouble.
My Rating:
