He’s just doing his job, and ultimately the film is about work - what it means to work a job that strips one’s humanity in the service of a contract and what it means when your life’s work results in those agents.
Agent 47’s motivations aren’t clear because he’s barely a human, despite Katia’s protestations otherwise. Wick’s motivations were clear: vengeance. Something like “John Wick” worked beautifully to showcase a waterfall of cascading murder. There are times when the movie feels profoundly like a first-person shooter video game, which makes sense because it’s based on one. Unfortunately, the action that we do get is chaotic and incomprehensible, largely bloodless and without any sense of tension. There’s a half-baked attempt to answer some existential questions about the nature of humanity when you’re a murderous robot person, but the sentimentality doesn’t mesh with the film’s desire for cathartic, cinematic violence.
Katia falls in with Smith and 47, and after a series of rapidly switching alliances, they’re off to the races. She’s equipped with near-psychic survival skills, including an extra-sensory perception for lurking dangers. He works for a woman, Diana (played by Angelababy - that’s actually her name), who gives him cryptic instructions on the phone.Ĭaught in the middle is Litvenko’s daughter, Katia (Hannah Ware), who is also searching for her father, having been abandoned as a child. 47 is trying to stop Syndicate from making more agents. In pursuit are Agent 47 (Rupert Friend), a contract killer so focused on his job that he’s practically a robot, and John Smith (a woefully miscast Zachary Quinto), who works for the private organization Syndicate International. It’s so coldblooded, it’s practically reptilian.ĭirected by newcomer Aleksander Bach, with a screenplay by Skip Woods and Michael Finch, the story seems overly complicated but is actually quite simple: Someone’s trying to make more genetically enhanced agents that are similar to 47, and in order to succeed, it’s necessary to find the originator of the project, Litvenko (Ciaran Hinds), who has dropped off the face of the earth. “Hitman: Agent 47” just can’t keep up, especially given its overly serious take on the genre.
If you see only one movie about governmentally modified assassins this weekend, don’t make it “Hitman: Agent 47.” “American Ultra” is the far superior take on the unknowing super spy because it takes itself far less seriously and can actually poke fun at the genre.
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