WordPress was being a bitch and ate my post just as I was about to publish it, so this is a rewrite…grrr…
This is going to be the first in a continuing series of Action Movie Reviews, because I love them, I watch them like no tomorrow, and they have less cultural relevance and lasting power than chick flicks. The inaugural film is the semi-recent Hitman.
Now, I have not played the video game upon which Hitman is based. I suck at videogames to an alarming degree and managed to fail the training level of “Tomb Raider”. A game which requires me to stealthily move about and kill people silently is not one I’m going to be very good at, and the only way I can concievably see myself killing someone with a videogame is if I accidentally beaned them during a failed Wii tennis serve.
This wasn’t a terrible movie– wasn’t great either, but come on, if you rented freakin’ Hitman you knew exactly what you were going to see so no complaining. In fact, my only huge gripe with this movie (after I finished playing that favorite action movie game “Guess That Accent”):
Where the f•ck did Agent 47 keep getting all that money?
Now, again, I haven’t playd the game, but based on what I saw in the film, this is a guy whose entire life is controlled by the organization he works for. So, if they’re trying to set him up or kill him off (why they’re trying this is either never explained, or I was too transfixed by Timothy Olyphant’s shiny, shiny head to notice), wouldn’t they at the VERY least freeze his bank account? And yet he’s skipping merrily across Russia and Turkey buying clothes, fancy hotel rooms, and posh dinners. Huh?
Oh, and the clothing worn by the denizens of Udre Belicoff’s drug den nearly had me on the floor laughing. Outside of movies, does anyone anywhere wear things like that? I’ve never seen it and I regularly hang out in drag bars.
So what did I like? Weirdly, I really liked how little a hardened badass Timothy Olyphant looks and came across as. Agent 47 is like a nerd gone bad. I really liked how there was no romantic/sexual subplot between 47 and Nika– I hate romance in action movies! Dammit, I came for guns and guts, not weepy confessions of undying love. 47 is incredibly awkward around women he’s not trying to kill, and is very probably a virgin: the anti-James Bond. And this is great and works for the character, because it comes across as someone who’s never had any kind of relationship with anyone that isn’t in his organization. He probably only has the vaguest idea how babies are made, and that is such a bizarre thing for an action movie protagonist that it’s weirdly refreshing.
Action-wise, pretty good, although the “arty” cuts and camera tricks kind of screwed the flow. Pretty obvious CG in places, but good martial arts. The hotel escape was really neat and I couldn’t help noticing during it that Timothy Olyphant has really nice feet. That’s about the strangest thing I’ve ever thought in a movie. Gratuitous breast shots abound, and one full-frontal female– for the girls, one fogged-glass shower scene and a leetle shirtlessness. (Despite the fact that 85% of action movies are the gayest movies ever, no mainstream action flick is going to have a naked guy in it, so we girls take what we can get…)
Explosions? Hell yes.
Gallons and gallons of blood? Hell yes.
Fake Russian accents? HELL YES.
Final score: Three out of five Stathams. Some good mindless action with plenty of head-scratching “huh?” moments. But hey, any movie that repeatedly uses the term “arterial spray” can’t be THAT bad.
