Rent Hitman: Agent 47 (2015)

Bang Bang Bang - Hitman: Agent 47 review by NC

Guns and superhuman skills in killing anything that walks. Sounds familiar? Come back Sean Connery with 2 good fists.

An atrocious, boring & pointless film, which squanders the promise of the 1st one - Hitman: Agent 47 review by TB

When it was announced that there was to be a film adaption of the wildly successful Hitman video games, there was the well-deserved skepticism & cynicism. By 2007, there had been multiple previous attempts at bringing/adapting often stratospherically successful video games to the big screen, although the motivation was almost always to see how much more money could be squeezed out of the faithful fans rather than making something great. And because this was the motivation (alongside no doubt the arrogance of Hollywood producers & the studio chiefs, basically thinking “This film stars this beloved game character/is set in that narrative world, so shove out some schlocky script that was written by someone in a few days who has in all likelihood never even played the game they are adapting, then watch the money roll in,”) the results were almost always unwatchable & often did huge damage to the game’s reputation as well. Uwe Boll was the worst offender, churning out dud after painful dud, films which were pretty much unwatchable.

However, when the 1st Hitman came out, things were different. Hiring Timothy Olyphant as 47 was a stroke of absolute genius, having already firmly established his credentials & reputation for intensity/presence in Deadwood, plus the casting of Dougray Scott as the antagonist meant there was serious talent on the screen, not just bit-part actors who said yes to get screen time. And finally, there was no watering down of the violence/sanitising the film to achieve a 12A rating. The result was a film which, even in 2024, I still think is the best video game movie adaptation ever. Whilst it was silly, far-fetched & often implausible, it was also fun. 

So when the inevitable sequel was green lit (which it always would be after the 1st film grossed over 5 times its budget,) there was some interest to see what would happen next. But this film not only destroys all the good work the 1st movie started, it almost seems like it is in competition with Boll’s output to be the worst possible adaptation imaginable.

I almost don’t know where to begin. Rupert Friend is totally, utterly & completely miscast as Agent 47. He looks like someone going to a fancy dress party who bought the costume, shaved his head & was told by his friends “Errrr, sure you look like him…” In no way is he intimidating, threatening, imposing or ominous. And the longer I watched, the more out of place he was. The script is atrocious as well. I appreciate that the 1st film wouldn’t win any screenwriting Oscars, but it was enjoyable & also had a plot that you could understand. I genuinely could not tell you what happened in the 30 or so minutes that I could tolerate watching this, or how it formed anything that could be called a storyline. There are some action scenes which didn’t work, either because it was just too stupid to even be halfway possible, or because I didn’t in any way buy Friend’s performance. 

After about half an hour, and almost at the same time, me & my friend who I was watching it with both looked at each other & said “This is rubbish, let’s watch something else.” And I felt like sending the studio a bill for the time I had wasted & would never get back. But, like the many previous video game adaptations, this film was only ever designed to be a money spinner, with the added boost that it was the sequel to a beloved & well-regarded (by the fans, not critics,) 1st film, which is why it had far more goodwill than these movies usually have. 

And finally, as if to really hammer home & prove the point that these films are designed to be nothing more than ringing cash tills, after the panning of this film, it was tentatively announced that there was to be a film universe with multiple other video game characters. Because in Hollywood, when an adaptation with one character fails, the obvious answer is to make another film stuffed with as many as possible, to appeal to/piss off even more fans…