So I went to see Hitman : Agent 47 last night. Oh, boy!

It is visually very sleek. The action scenes are well done, and well executed. I have not played the game so I can’t really compare the two 47’s, but it seems to me that this one seems to keep closer to what I imagine a 47 to be, more clinical than the first one, but also clinical by conscious choice. Some of the actions sequences are weird, as if the camera purposely avoids shooting the actors faces. There’s no romance in it; even the one scene where Smith and Van Dees are together is wooden and artificial, though quite possibly that’s intentional. And yet again, here is a movie with ONE female lead!

The story, well, that’s a different matter. It is full of rather cheap devices. This is the point where you decide to either go see the movie first, or decide that it’s ok, you’ll keep reading, after all, wasn’t the first one already bad.

 

Do you remember the trailer, where 47 is shackled to the table in the interrogation room and the other guy puts his rifle on the table? Well, that’s a scene from the movie. I know, you’d expect that from a trailer, right? It’s supposed to show you snippets of the movie. Now I ask you, who in their right mind, arrests a man carrying a rifle in a bag, and two guns on him, shackles him to a table in the interrogation room and then, brings said rifle in the room? Never mind mentioning that it’s a very fancy gun, with a hair trigger, or loading the gun for that matter. Another such moment is the utterly predictable one where the guy who hasn’t come out of his office for years, obviously comes out of his office, because the guy he wants to talk to is shackled to a chair.

 

Now if we wanted to be really finicky about all this, we could mention Smith. Smith’s got a very fancy body armour. The kind that apparently means that even when he gets shot or in a car crash, his clothes remain immaculate. But you don’t know that when he gets shot first. We could also get onto the character who has stage 3 lung cancer, yet walks around with symptoms resembling those of asthma. We could mention the fact that once again, a character gets comfortable with killing uncomfortably quickly. Many things we could mention, which don’t take away from one simple fact.

 

The movie is fun. As action movies go, it’s not bad.