Hitman: Critic Reviews

Based on the video game franchise of the same title, Hitman exploits every action-flick cliche imaginable and still manages to be dull.

This film is like watching the actual game played by someone with slow reactions. That's not much of a spectator sport.

A thoroughly entertaining experience.

There have been plenty of movies adapted from video games before, but Hitman may be the first one that actually feels like a computer wrote and directed it.

As cold as it is dumb.

The only thing Hitman succeeds in doing is confirming what common sense could tell you without spending millions of dollars on a special-effects-filled movie: A series of novels is much richer source material than a series of video games.

Hitman stands right on the threshold between video games and art. On the wrong side of the threshold, but still, give it credit.

Here's all you really need to know before the opening credits roll in Hitman: There's going to be a lot of bloodshed.

In the finest tradition of adolescent identification figures, he's not only ruthless, dispatching numerous baddies with hair-trigger shots to the head, but profoundly desexualized.

Ultra-violent, nonsensical and peppered with gratuitous nudity.

A Eurotrashy vidgame knockoff that misses its target by a mile. Numbingly unthrilling as it lurches from one violent encounter to another, the pic's dark roots in an electronic, non-dramatic medium are plain to see.

If someone ran this guy through a scanner, the readout would say: "Mark down and stock in straight-to-video aisle."

A Bourne knock-off, and not a very good one at that.

The plot of Hitman is difficult to follow and in any case secondary to the sheer spectacle of murder and mayhem.

Efficiently derivative, mildly stylish, sporadically sexy and eminently forgettable.

The formula is not that far removed from James Bond except there's a hole at its center. Agent 47, played by a virtually expressionless Timothy Olyphant, is a soulless, emotionally dead protagonist.

Awkwardly paced and muddled.

Olyphant faz o possivel com um personagem unidimensional por natureza, mas o roteiro absurdo e a direcao fragil de Gens, que parece acreditar que cortes rapidos substituem arcos narrativos, conferem ao filme um ar de producao feita para DVD.

You should see this movie for the action and gunfights... oh, and for Olga Kurylenko.

French director Xavier Gens keeps the action riveting and spectacular.

An army of skinhead assassins in matching suits seems a bit conspicuous for an agency supposedly shrouded in secrecy.

Only the deadpan delivery of Timothy Olyphant as Agent 47 enlivens the wooden dialogue of this collection of cliches masquerading as a silver-screen adaptation.

A slick take on sniping, strangling, homicidal body doubles, and a seductive Moscow sex slave in distress, the property of a local baddie, whom the hero invites to tag along from inside his car trunk, don't ask.

...a better film than I was expecting, even if it doesn't do much beyond the ordinary.