Entertainment, Movies - Marine Corps Times

Way off target

Film adaptations of video games are a study in devolution — since the 1982 fountainhead, “TRON,” each has felt emptier and dumber than the last.

“Hitman,” based on a popular video game featuring an ultraviolent assassin, is more of the same: no story to speak of, and no characters worth rooting for.

Once writer Skip Woods, whose sole previous credit of note is the 1991 John Travolta bomb “Swordfish,” and director Xavier Gens, a Frenchman with an equally thin résumé, deliver the shallow thrill of a video game character brought to life — which lasts about two minutes — nothing in the other 98 minutes will raise the pulse of even avid fans of “Hitman,” the game.

The problems begin with the miscasting of Timothy Olyphant as the nameless “Agent 47.” Playing the stoic, slow-burning sheriff on HBO’s “Deadwood,” Olyphant cut an effective figure, but here he’s too much of a pretty boy for a role that screams for someone more rough-edged.

Agent 47 is an assassin for a shadowy organization called — wait for it — “The Organization,” which “takes no sides, but has links to every government,” whatever that means, and employs a cadre of killers trained from birth for one thing: to, uh ... kill.

The story is as impenetrable as it is senseless. It opens with 47 confronting Whittier (Dougray Scott), an Interpol agent who has tracked the killer for three years but keeps losing him — even though 47 doesn’t exactly blend, since he’s bald and has a bar code tattooed on the back of his head. (To keep tabs on his sell-by date?)

Then we go back three months to see what led to that point. It’s a muddled stew involving the Russian president (Ulrich Thomsen), his gangster brother (Henry Ian Cusick) and a hot, pouty hooker named Nika (Olga Kurylenko).

Somewhere along the line, 47’s own employers target him for elimination, forcing him to fend off attacks from his chrome-dome brethren. He barely breaks a sweat; he may be No. 47 in your program, but he’s No. 1 on the death-dealing depth chart.

He eventually goes on the run with Nika — again, for reasons that aren’t quite clear. In fact, she seems to be in the film mainly to highlight 47’s creepy asexuality.

The dude has about as much use for women as he does for combs. Early on, when a blonde hits on him at a bar, he stares at her like she’s an alien life form and simply walks away.

And when Nika strips down and attempts to jump him, he whips out a syringe, pumps her full of some kind of knockout drug, then casually rolls her off himself.

“You don’t want to f--- me, you don’t want to kill me. ... I’ve never felt such indifference in my life!” she later huffs, in one of the roughly three witty lines in the script.

Kurylenko shows the most spark, though no one here is really acting, Olyphant least of all. Character development is similarly sparse; in 47’s case, it’s the opening credits scene and a pair of one-second flashbacks.

And the action — you know, the whole point — is nothing you haven’t seen in dozens of similar films, a monotonous slog through one generic gunfight after another, interrupted by one ho-hum swordfight.

Until these films transcend, rather than just replicate, their source games, you may as well stay home and mash buttons; at least you get something out of that.

You get next to nothing from “Hitman.” It’s one of the flimsiest con jobs ever to emerge from one of Hollywood’s dreariest genres. Ë