STUDIO: Fox
RELEASE DATE: March 11, 2008
STARRING: Timothy Olyphant, Dougray Scott, Olga Kurylenko, Robert Knepper, Ulrich Thomsen, Henry Ian Cusick, and Michael Offei
WRITTEN BY: Skip Woods
DIRECTED BY: Xavier Gens
FEATURES: In The Crosshairs Featurette
Digital Hits Featurette
Instruments of Destruction Featurette
Settling the Score Featurette
Deleted Scenes
Alternate Ending
Gag Reel

Further proof that the transition from video game to feature film is rarely a smooth one, this week sees the DVD release of the action flick Hitman, a shoot-em-up that might have the same lead character as the landmark Eidos series of games, but that's about where the similarities end. The Hitman games were a brilliant experiment in free will. The player was encouraged to use the maximum amount of stealth and problem-solving to perform his hits, thereby leaving the fewest innocent bystanders and making the least amount of noise. But the player could just as often go in guns blazing and take out as many women and children as he chose to on his way to his target. The Hitman series literally put you in the shoes of a hired killer and they were (and still are) an incredibly visceral and entertaining experience. Sounds like a great springboard for a movie, right? Not in the hands of writer Skip Woods and Xavier Gens, who replace the dark edges of the video games with dull characters who do ridiculous things and unbelievably choose to inject a love interest into the story of one of gaming's most notorious loners. Hitman the movie makes you want to grab the controller and hit reset as soon as possible.

Timothy Olyphant (Deadwood, Live Free or Die Hard) stars as the legendary Agent 47, a "Keyser Soze"-esque character in that most of the people who've ever even laid eyes on him are dead. After a promising opening that uses "Ave Maria" well enough that fans of the game (the song is closely associated with the series) might actually think that this could be the movie that breaks the "video games flicks are horrible" rule, Hitman moves into the main plot, a complex Russian assignment. Agent 47 completes the assignment, but suddenly his target isn't dead any more and everyone's after our anti-hero. Why is Agent 47 being framed? How many purely average hitmen does it take to kill the best? Why should I care?

Hitman never answers that crucial final question, choosing apathy over cool and complicated dialogue over actual plot. The film thinks walking slow and looking serious will automatically make a character suave and smooth, but Agent 47 comes off as anything but in Hitman. The film briefly comes to life with its nods to the gamers and a couple of well-staged action sequences, but Hitman is shockingly short on actual shoot-em-ups. There's an awesome four-person sword fight and a pair of two-handed gun battles, but that's about it. Even worse, Hitman is ridiculously heavy on expository dialogue, the kind that tries to explain an elaborate plot that fans will be able to unravel with even the slightest scrutiny (like why the stealthiest assassin in the world is bald, pale, wearing a trench coat, and standing out in Russia like a nun at a Snoop Dogg concert). It makes no sense, which is fine if the movie is a guilty pleasure video game flick, but not fine if it tries to take itself as deadly seriously as Hitman. And worst of all, the whole thing is shot with the kind of clunky production value that feels more like Wesley Snipes's latest straight-to-video flick than a major Hollywood product.

It's hard to tell if a spectacular video transfer will elevate Hitman above its peers because Fox has a nasty habit of sending us watermarked screeners that look good enough to review but also clearly won't have the same visual quality as the street copies. We imagine it will be typical Fox - good but not great. As for special features, the unrated version of Hitman does include a better-than-average collection with deleted scenes, a gag reel, and four informative featurettes, although the lack of a commentary may upset fans of the film. Even with the nice collection of extras and the presumably good technical transfer, the success of Hitman all comes back to the movie itself. For hardcore fans of the genre, the action might be enough for a rental, but everything else falls far short of not just the bar set by the video game but the one set by the last action movie you saw.