Super Spy/Secret Agent Summer 2015 rolls on! I know that I keep bringing this up, but it’s kind of getting ridiculous at this point. If I had any journalistic integrity at all I would go into research mode and find out if this is something that happens every year, but there’s a Gilmore Girls marathon on right now and that just takes precedent, ya know? Anyways, I know that it sounds like I’m complaining, but I’m not. I really do like spy movies, and as long as they’re high quality, I say keep churning them out and let my eyeballs feast on the delicious and nutritious violence that springs forth.
That being said, Hitman: Agent 47 is not a good spy movie. Its not a good movie. Almost nothing about it works and it’s an all out assault on the senses. Hitman tells the age old tale of Agent 47 (Rupert Friend), an, umm, Agent who was genetically engineered to be a super solider and now he has to find his missing creator with the help of his estranged daughter. All the while they are being pursued by Syndicated International, an evil corporation with a name so blatantly evil that I cannot believe that every governmental oversight committee in the world didn’t take one look at them and say, “Aww Hell no!” They hop the globe (kinda) and meet up in Singapore for a final showdown with the leader of Syndicate International (please don’t make me keep typing that stupid fucking name) and its top enforcer, Zachery Quinto. Stuff happens, there’s an ending, you know the drill.
Hitman begins with one of my least favorite cinematic cliches: a voiceover that explains plot points that will be regurgitated more organically later on. Stop doing this movies! Let us have some mystery for a while and wonder what’s happening, instead of straight up telling us at the beginning! Whatever. Hitman actually adds a fun new twist on this horrible trope by including information in the monologue that is completely irrelevant to the story and won’t matter after about five minutes. Its really spectacular.
But I kind of get why director Aleksander Bach* would do this. The plot makes little to no sense and I’m sure that he wanted to try and shove in as many sign posts to help the audience along as possible. Now, I’ve never played a Hitman game, nor have I seen the old Hitman movie, so maybe fans with a ton of insight into the history of this world will be able to make perfect sense of what’s going on, but shouldn’t a stand alone piece of media like this be accessible to everyone, not only those who have done hours and hours of homework. Its so goddamned dumb.
And every character in this movie is fucking stupid as well. There’s a moment about a third of the way through the film where the female lead (Hannah Ware) is talking to Quinto and he keeps insisting that she knows where her father is, even though she doesn’t. She then asks him a few simple questions about her father, which he answers without even having to think, and using this new information, she is able to deduce where he has been hiding. These aren’t weird questions or anything either. Its shit like “what languages does he speak?” and “Does he have medical conditions?” Shit, I could have figured this riddle out with that same information. How is it possible that entire multimillion dollar organizations couldn’t?
Everything about this movie is just so cheap and lazy. There’s some truly abhorrent CGI in places, everyone sounds like English is their second language (including those actually from England and America), and even though it’s rated R, it never really makes use of it. Its almost like this film is stuck in some weird Limbo where it wants to be a PG-13 action movie, but feels obliged to throw in just enough blood and F-Bombs to justify its rating, resulting in a movie that has the strangest fucking tone.
There’s a lot more that I want to talk about, but I’m running out of space, so I’ll just hit them real quick:
>Can we all stop pretending that Zachery Quinto is a good actor? Cause he is absolute shit.
>This entire movie was paid for by Audi product placement.
>Quinto has “sub-dermal body armor,” and yes, this is a stupid idea.
>This movie is painful to watch at points. There are strobe lights that should come with a seizure warning, a TON of fish-eye lens, and music louder and more pounding than a German rave. It almost made me sick.
>How does Agent 47 turn an inhaler into a bomb? That never gets explained.
>Is it possible for a movie to be “aggressively European”? Because that’s the phrase that kept popping into my head.
>There’s a scene where a woman with a baby strapped to her chest turns out to be an assassin. She shoots, and then is shot. In the logic of the movie, was that baby supposed to be real or fake? Either way, this was the best moment of the entire movie!
In conclusion, this is a movie that I think had some cool thoughts, but had no idea how to properly implement them. Right at the end there is an incredibly stylized shot with people getting shot on a pure white staircase, followed by Agent 47 and the daughter riding in an elevator, and it was actually really interesting to look at. It all made me wonder what this would have looked like if someone like Guy Ritchie was at the helm. This could have been a glorious piece of violent pop art, but ended up being middling and dumb. Dumb, dumb, bad, and dumb.
*It should be noted that this is Bach’s only IMDb credit. Seriously, this is it.
