What are you going to do?
What I do.
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Video game movie adaptations have an incredibly bad rep, and with very good reason. Taking a video game's environments and characters and giving them new faces and voices with a set story somehow just doesn't fit in as well as it seems it should. Now, I enjoy Tomb Raider for what it is: good, mindless fun, but nothing memorable. Hitman had a lot wrong with it, but there were also some redeeming qualities that let me enjoy it.
"How does a good man kill?" mused Timothy Olyphant as he held a supposed target at gunpoint. Indeed, how does an assassin, who is supposed to have no conscience of his own, kill on command without a second thought? The Hitman has consideration for the public- he prefers to kill discreetly and quickly, never targeting people his clients don't ask to be hit. The Hitman is to be devoid of any and all emotion- no personal emotional attachments can be kept as baggage. He cannot fall in love, he cannot keep close acquaintances, he cannot even have a name. Agent 47 is the world's premiere assassin, the ultimate weapon of discreet destruction. While Olyphant certainly looked the part, I feel that he could've done better at his performance. He was fairly quiet and droll, almost trying to imitate Elias Toufexis' voice (the VA for Adam Jensen in Deus Ex: Human Revolution).
The action in Hitman was pretty well-done, for a video game adaptation. The Hitman games are known for their long, slow, and precise levels that require time and replay to fully master. While it isn't necessarily possible to completely emulate this in the film, Agent 47 does perform a variety of hits that ring of his trademark style that is so prevalent throughout the series. Each and every major kill is distinct and most of them feel necessary to advance the story. The action scenes did a great job of building up the tension and were really well done.
There's has never been a perfect video game adaptation, and Hitman definitely is not without its faults. For one, the character development was terrible. Timothy Olyphant and Olga Kurylenko had great chemistry, but it wasn't utilized to its full potential like it could have. Kurylenko's character felt like a forced filler who was only there to help 47 move towards his destination. Some of their dialogue was just atrocious, and I felt like ripping my ears out when I heard some of it. Perfect endings seem hard to come by, and I felt that Hitman could have ended much better than it did. It honestly felt really rushed, and just kind of fizzled away into the credits. It could have been worse, though. They could have gone with the alternate ending, which I won't give away, but it was a real slap in the face. It almost felt like a straight ripoff of Casino Royale, it was that bad.
As far as video game adaptations go, you could certainly do far worse than Hitman. The action was awesome, and the film itself felt like it could actually be a Hitman game. I loved how the director successfully tried to emulate the feeling of the original games, and the action fit in really well with the story. Even though it was less cerebral than the games, the way the plot was executed in the film felt rather fitting. Hitman is a film that isn't without its problems, but managed to be fun while it lasts.