Hitman is a disgrace. To think that adults could sit in a room, write a script, obtain financing, cast actors, and then head out to shoot this - well, it defies all common sense. Horrific clichés, illogical plot points, terrible acting: this one fails on just about every level. I guess what I'm saying is this: I didn't love it.

Based on the video game of the same name, the story is about Agent 47 (played by Timothy Olyphant) as a shadowy assassin. He's a killer for hire, employed by a group only known as "The Organization." It's all pretty much as you'd expect - fancy weaponry and moral ambiguity are the watchwords of this story. 47 becomes embroiled in a double cross (yawn) and along the way he takes a hostage named Nika (Olga Kurylenko) whose main skill seems to be her lack of qualms about going topless. All of which would be perfectly fine a la Bond or Bourne if the story and acting weren't so damned awful.

It is though. The story... ugh, and double sigh, man, the story is just unbelievably terrible, like something you'd come up with if you'd forgotten you had a script due the next day. I realize that all espionage action films, from Mission Impossible to Spy Games must take liberty with logic but that's not what is happening here. The hostage 47 takes on has a tattoo on her face. I mean, really? Are there so many women with tattoos on their faces that she'd just blend right in?

He also is raised by the aforementioned shadowy organization, brought up to be a trained killer... and yet he's paid for each job by someone on the other end of a computer. What? He's capable of knocking off world leaders and yet he has no idea who he works for but they pay him to his Agent 47 account. Right then. Sure, you could explain this away by saying he has a fake name and bank account but the film doesn't bother. He wears a suit everywhere, again, that's fine, but I've got to think an actual assassin would be smart enough not to roll around in a suit with a sparkling bald head and a bar code tattooed on the back of his noggin. Call me crazy.

I grant that all this, his look, his feel was in the game as such. I've played the game. I liked the game. But when you adapt something for the big screen it has to be more realistic. It just does. It's competing with everything else that has come before it. If you want to leave the trademark suit and bald head, great, I'll buy it, but then you'd better cast someone who actually seems like a killer. Timothy Olyphant doesn't come across as a tough sociopath; he just seems weird and anti-social. Any room he entered he'd be instantly marked as a freak. I can't think that would be good for business. There's also the other half of this movie - the Interpol agent trying to track him down, but it's all so nasty idiotic that I'll spare you.

If you liked the game and want-to-want nothing more than to see some guns get shot off then this might be for you. However, if you've got a brain and/or have seen a few dozen movies in the past year this is a full-on skip. The trailer looks decent, the game is good, and the concept could have been very cool but it all adds up to futility. Hitman isn't bad-ass; it's not cool; it's not fun. What it is is something we call "dumb." That's no place for us smart folk to go roaming.

Grade: D

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