Hitman (2007) More at IMDb Pro »

From childhood Agent 47 was trained and conditioned to kill. As an adult he is one of many hit men working for The Organisation across the world – killing on behalf of unseen clients. However when a successful hit on the Russian president is presented as a near miss, 47 realises that something is up – a realisation only confirmed when the Russian authorities converge on his position. Having dealt with them, Agent 47 goes on the offensive to expose those that have turned against him.

Hit-man got very poor reviews when it came out in the cinemas and this was enough to make me skip it then, but not totally enough when it came to DVD. Seeing it for myself I must say that the majority of critics were being a bit too snotty but mostly did have a point because this is certainly not a very good film. However it is not a terrible one by any means. As many others have said, this is a case of a film not even pretending to do anything other than the genre basics and I cannot imagine many viewers would have come to this not knowing what to expect. In that regard it does just that in all aspects – good and bad, well "so-so" and bad. The action sequences are typical slow-motion, stylised stuff that you have seen countless other places. They are not remarkable but they do provide distraction in how easy they are to watch.

So far so genre but in other areas it doesn't even really do the basics. The plot has potential but the delivery is fudged and the significance or extent is not that well expressed and seemed detached from the action, rather than driving it. Compare and contrast it with the Bourne films and you'll get my meaning because I thought that trilogy did it much better than this film. The dialogue is also poor and at times it does feel like it has been written by a piece of software rather than people. The dialogue also knocks onto the performances. Olyphant is solid enough when asked to be cool and deadly but in scenes where he has to do more he mostly flounders. Scott has more talking to do and at times he sounds like he can barely be bothered to pronounce the words – he is poor from start to finish. Kurylenko has the thankless task of being the "sexy plot device" and is not helped by some terrible dialogue that would have taken some amazing delivery and chemistry to make work – she cannot do the delivery and she cannot break the cold hit-man to produce chemistry. The rest of the cast are so-so but do the basics well enough.

Hit-man is not a rubbish film by any means bur I can understand why many "proper" critics gave it such a kicking. The reason is that it is totally generic in the areas where it should have been strong (the action) and in every other area it is subpar even by the standards of the genre.