Hitman: Agent 47 Review

I find it funny that everything right now is trying to become the new Bourne or Bond. Granted, it has been a pretty good year for action movies like this as Kingsman: The Secret Service was a huge surprise earlier this year and Mission: Impossible - Rogue Nation is making bank right now. This will continue later this year as the latest Bond movie Spectre is sure to be a monster hit. Meanwhile we have all these little August movies that are trying to join in on the party. I keep seeing TV spots for them that say "Most entertaining movie of the Summer" or "Better than Bond and Bourne." Meanwhile I'm sitting on my couch wondering who in the heck said that. Must be some bitter old movie critic that hates Bond and Bourne, because no. These movies aren't the same caliber as those. Yes, I did like both The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and American Ultra, but they aren't even on same level as Kingsman or Mission: Impossible. And this latest movie, Hitman: Agent 47? Oh heck no! Not even close. In fact, compared to this movie even The Man From U.N.C.L.E. looks like an epic masterpiece. This movie was a mess. I wanted to turn off my brain and have fun. I'm good at that. But I didn't have any fun with this. When I did turn on my brain to try to figure out what was happening, it got worse. Do yourself a favor and just skip this movie.

The premise of this movie was fairly straightforward and thus I actually bought into it at first. Here we have a woman who is trying to figure out the whereabouts of her father. He left her alone when she was little and never returned for her. In the midst of trying to locate him, she suddenly notices that she is being chased by a trained assassin and tries to escape when luckily Spock comes to her rescue as the man assigned to stop the assassin from killing her. And of course by Spock, you know I don't mean that literally. I'm talking about Zachary Quinto, the guy who plays Spock in the new wannabe Star Trek films that tricked millions of people into thinking they actually liked Star Trek when in reality they were an insult to the Star Trek name. Wait, did I just say that? Moving on. This initial premise for Hitman: Agent 47 could've been a good one. It had a little bit of a Terminator vibe to it, which I thought could've worked. For a moment I even wondered if I was going to be one of the few that liked the film. Nope. After starting off interesting enough, this movie took some weird turns that it just expects the audience to totally buy and I totally didn't buy it at all. In fact, for the last three-fourths of the movie I was completely miffed at what was happening and when the movie ended I had a hard time trying to connect everything together and make sense of it all. Was someone drunk when they wrote this movie?

But that's not even the biggest problem with this movie. If I go into an action movie like this, I can sometimes forgive a really stupid plot if I have fun with the actions scenes themselves. But I didn't. For much of the movie, we had this super soldier trying to train this other super soldier and both of them are so super that they just walk into a building and kill everyone in one shot. No suspense. No contest. No danger for our "protagonists." It was just plain out boring. I like it when our action hero is put in a situation where we as an audience aren't sure if they are going to be able to pull this off or we aren't sure how they are possibly going to do it. Even with someone as unstoppable as Jason Bourne we aren't sure how he's going to succeed at what he's trying to do. But in Hitman, they just walk into the building and start shooting everyone and everything is just too easy that it's not even fun or the least bit suspenseful. On top of that, there is a whole lot of downtime in this movie where nothing is happening. It's bad enough that I was bored during the action scenes, but it's even worse that I wanted to fall asleep in my chair because there was so much downtime that was even more boring.

Honestly I feel bad for the actors in this movie. They didn't do a bad job. In fact, I really liked the main female in this, Hannah Ware. I also liked our main male lead, Rupert Friend. These two are fairly unknown names that could've enjoyed a breakout performance had the writing not been so bad. Sometimes actors are able to overcome the bad writing and still make their character likable. Unfortunately that's not the case here. I didn't care about any of the characters. There was a spot in the end that I think I was supposed to feel a bit of emotion, but I didn't because I just didn't care about anyone in the movie. Zachary Quinto was probably the least likable of the bunch, but I don't feel bad for him because I know he will recover from this. The other two I fear that they may have lost their opportunity, which sucks for them. Oh, did I mention that there is a long car chase scene in the movie that is one of the worst car chase scenes that I've seen because it looked like a 10-minute car commercial? And to end with a huge punch in the gut, the very final scene in this movie before it went to credits was the worst and most confusing scene in the movie. I was at a loss for words during the credits. And I was laughing out loud because of how bad it was. Ouch.

Please, do yourself a favor and skip this movie. Don't even rent it or watch it on Netflix. Not only is it not worth your money, but there are so many other things that you could do with the 96 minutes that are more worthwhile than watching this movie. Everything I mentioned combines to make a huge mess of a movie. We started out with what seemed like an interesting premise with some likable actors that were doing a good job, but then the movie took some weird twists that just didn't work out at all. The action was boring. There was way too much downtime. None of the characters were likable. We had a long car commercial thrown in there with the chase scene. The very final scene was super confusing. It just doesn't work. I mentally checked out about 30 minutes into the movie. I wanted to leave. I wanted to take a nap in my chair. But I did neither of those and instead I earned my badge of honor for completing the film and now I am eligible to give out my grade. It won't be the worst grade of the year, but it's far from a passing grade as I will give Hitman: Agent 47 a 4/10.