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'Hitman' can't find his target

Christian Toto
November 23, 2007

The phrase "based on the hit video game" has replaced "starring Pauly Shore" as the ultimate warning sign for moviegoers.

"Hitman," starring Timothy Olyphant of "Deadwood" fame as a perfect assassin, lives down to those expectations. But the actor gives this anti-hero more life than a figure born from computer bytes ought to have. He carries himself as if this were a franchise audition, not just a genre exercise.

The actor, last seen giving Bruce Willis fits in "Live Free or Die Hard," is Agent 47, or the Hitman to you and me. He's been trained since birth to be an assassin, something explained during the opening credits but never addressed again in any meaningful way.

His latest assignment for the mysterious group known as the Agency is to kill a Russian presidential candidate (Ulrich Thomsen) drawing headlines for his moderate views. The assassination goes off as planned, but news reports insist the president is still alive and well.

Someone must be playing a trick on the Hitman. He never misses.

The trick is actually a double-cross. Suddenly, our Hitman has a bull's-eye on the back of his bald skull.

He's being pursued by operatives with similar chrome domes as well as by a tenacious Interpol agent named Mike Whittier (Dougray Scott). Wittier wants the Hitman behind bars for his past handiwork.

The only one on the Hitman's side is Nika (Olga Kurylenko), a Russian prostitute who gets mixed up with the plot against him.

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