A Review of Hitman: Agent 47 (2015)

I’ve played Hitman games, I understand the concept of the game-play, the themes of the character, world and story. A film based on the franchise could do well. But this isn’t a film based off of the Hitman franchise.

Hitman: Agent 47 is a film that rips off Wanted, Watchmen, Bourne, Terminator, The Matrix and a few others, fills in the gaps with homogeneous bland action film tropes, all in a bid to create some sort of Frankenstein’s monster of a movie.

I recently watched Jurassic World (which I reviewed here). I’d heard it was bad but I watched it anyway and enjoyed it. With similar intent I decided to watch this Hitman adaptation.

As mentioned earlier, this film is ‘heavily influenced’ by a few other major action films in a very blunt way. Hitman: Agent 47 feels like it was made by a ten year old (which is a bad thing in this case).

The editing is poor- characters (or their limbs) will inexplicably be in totally different positions a second later. The CGI is bad, taking you out of the moment, like a slap to the face. The dialogue is so predictable and delivered so abhorrently it makes the action-less scenes of the film a tedious annoyance.

I did like a few things. The soundtrack was marginally better than average. The hand to hand combat was stiff and rigid but choreographed well- they were fun to watch when the editing didn’t butcher their beauty.

At this point I think I prefer the ’07 Hitman movie over this. At least its villain wasn’t a terminator and it’s hero a superhero. Oh yes did I say how 47 has powers?

And that’s what really gets me about this film: the script could have been easily translated into a half-apocalyptic near future sci-fi film and it would have actually worked. It wouldn’t have been a Hitman film but it would have been decent a film, which is all we want.

Overall Rating: 4.1/10