Based on the spectacular Eidos series of the same name and starring former Deadwood star Timothy Olyphant, Hitman tries to blend the suave, smooth style that has made "Agent 47" a household name for gamers. If you haven't played the game, Hitman is pure cool from a gaming standpoint. It's about stealthy action, where, if the gamer makes all the right moves, a seamless kill will go down and our hero will slink back into the darkness to await his next order. Hitman the movie is the opposite. It's a movie that feels like no one read the game's instruction manual, didn't actually play it, and tried to mimic what they thought fans would want to see - a moody hero who never smiles, a sexy Russian babe who's half-naked through most of the film, using two weapons at all times, etc. Hitman is proof that a movie isn't the sum of its cool parts, and that when you try to be suave and smooth, you often end up looking more like the opposite.

Timothy Olyphant (Live Free or Die Hard) stars as Agent 47, a killer who was bred to be the best at what he does. After a brief opening, set to "Ave Maria," a song that young gamers might think of as "The Hitman Theme Song," we get to the meat of the film, a complicated assignment in Russia. Agent 47's orders are to assassinate the new potential leader and be on his way. Agent 47 does the job, but it turns out that he's being framed. The leader that our anti-hero popped through the brain stem pops up again and now everyone is trying to kill the killer. What's going on? How can the writers get INTERPOL and the FSB involved? Isn't that T-Bag from Prison Break? (Robert Knepper co-stars as a Russian officer). How many average hitmen does it take to kill the best hitman? Too many.

Hitman only comes to life briefly in a few nods to gamers (like when our hero actually breaks into a hotel room where a couple are playing the game) and in a couple of well-staged action sequences. However, even those are in surprisingly short supply in Hitman. There are a couple of two-handed gun battles, one cool four-person sword fight, and that's about it. Far too much of Hitman is devoted to trying to explain an elaborate plot that unravels under the slightest amount of scrutiny. The action in Hitman isn't awful and might just barely be enough for hardcore fans, but even they'd admit that it makes up a shockingly small portion of the final result.

There's a lot that could have been saved, though, including the plot. The fatal flaw with Hitman is the clunky production around its screenplay. Every element of the design, from the sets to the way the film was shot and edited feels false. You might think that an action movie doesn't need to have a high production value and that it all comes down to cool choreography, but you'd be amazed at the difference a good cinematographer or editor can make on an action pic. Hitman needed to mostly be an exercise in over-the-top style, like the recently released Shoot 'Em Up, but none of it went to that realm. Director Xavier Gens pushes the plot forward with too much predictability. Everything feels more like a straight-to-video Steven Seagal movie when it really needed to look more like Casino Royale or the Mission: Impossible sequels to be effective.

As a screenplay, Hitman regularly defies all logic, which wouldn't be a problem if it had more style. You'll read hundreds of reviews a year that claim that cinema is dying because it's all style over substance, but you go to a movie like Hitman for the former, not the latter. It's easier to suspend disbelief - like that the bald, tattooed, pale guy in the suit wouldn't stand out in Russia - if you're swept up by the action. Hitman never sweeps you up. At one point, the female lead says to our hero that she's "never felt so much indifference in her life." I knew exactly how she felt.