Raised in secrecy and trained in the most lethal of the deadly arts, Agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant) has just brutally murdered the Russian President Mikhail Belicoff (Ulrich Thomsen) with all the world watching. Or did he? Suddenly this killer with no name is running for his life and his only ally is a sexy forced prostitute named Nika Boronina (Olga Kurylenko) who was once this leader’s secret mistress.

Timothy Olyphant kills for good in 20th Century Fox's Hitman

With an intrepid Interpol agent (Dougray Scott) hot on his tail and a Soviet Special Forces agent (Robert Knepper) looking to do him in, Agent 47 is running out of ideas and out of options but certainly not out of bullets, bullets he’s not afraid to fire. It’s like the man is a one-man army unemotionally bound to use any and all means necessary to get the job done, and considering this task concerns saving his own life it is definitely one he’s going to use all his talents to complete.

Based on a popular videogame (that I freely admit to have never played), Hitman is so bad it makes the collected films of Paul W.S. Anderson look like cinematic works of genius. A blatant rip-off of The Bourne Identity as well as its two sequels, this movie throws in every genre cliché known to man. The script by Skip Woods (Swordfish) is a panoply of rotten ideas and even worse characterizations, all of it directed by newcomer Xavier Gens with all the nuance and flair of an over-caffeinated high school student with an unhealthy fascination with Maxim and Guns & Ammo.

It’s easy to see why Olyphant, recently seen as the techno baddie in Live Free or Die Hard, has done everything he can to distance himself from this train wreck. Not only is he completely miscast as the titular assassin, the actor has also made no qualms about the fact he didn’t exactly think Gens was up for the job here. Rumors of reshoots have dogged this picture for months, and even if all this talk of re-editing is more or less a bunch of baloney no amount of tinkering could have saved this picture from anything other than complete and total disaster. 

In other words, the darn thing stinks. From the cast phoning it all in, to Kurylenko’s blatant and pointless nudity, to Geoff Zanelli’s (Disturbia) derivative musical score, to some of the worst staged fight sequences ever put to film, Hitman stinks on just about every single level. The film is an action disaster not even fit to be made fun of in some second rate Hot Fuzz knockoff, and for those looking for escapist fun I suggest they turn their attentions someplace else because this story of a hit is nothing more than a stunningly inept miss.

Film Rating: ê  (out of 4)

Additional Links:

-  Hitman Theatrical Trailer