“Hitman: Agent 47” teems with spectacularly choreographed action scenes, so real looking you would think you are actually watching a real video game, like the one the film’s based upon.
But you can’t expect more than that. Outside the territory of its gore explosiveness and visual intensity, stretches bare ground of pure dumbness, of pointless narrative entanglements, that is more often bereft of sense and tension, you probably wouldn’t care to follow. It’s ironic, really, when the film itself suits itself as a complex one, but barely constructs a coherent storyline to make us drawn and interested.
It’s an effort to lay groundworks for supposedly incoming conflicts and answers, but the thinly-structured backstories, more often than not, mess up during the process.
The narrative is complex. That’s probably what first time director, Alexandre Bach, and his team of writers, want to claim. That’s one easy thing to justify when you’ve stuffed your storyline with bunch of needless, if not poorly-structured expositories, but looking at it as a whole, it’s basically just about a genetically-engineered assassin trying to stop a malevolent organization from making more killing machines like him.
This involves going after a girl named Katia (Hannah Ware), who is actually the daughter of our hero’s creator. In pursuit of her, is Agent 47(Rupert Friend), the last and perfect, of his kind, and John Smith (Zachary Quinto) of the international criminal organization, Syndicate International (nope, not the one we heard in Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible). Katia, herself, has been trying to locate her father, and that’s exactly the information the ‘Syndicate’ hopes to get from her, so they could resume creating more of Agent 47’s kind, a dream only Katia’s father could help them fulfill.
Once the adrenaline picks up, deadly cat and mouse chases follow, and explosive breath-takingly executed fight setpieces roll out like dominoes, as if nothing can’t stop them.
“Hitman: Agent 47” works fine with this set up, and those who only look for action of such seismic scale, should get satisfied, but for a film that actually seems to aim achievements far beyond just perfectly-choreographed violence and visually explosive setpieces, this film is a misfire.
RATING: 5/10 (JE)
