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  Hitman Don't Ask Him To Take You Out
Year: 2007
Director: Xavier Gens
Stars: Timothy Olyphant, Dougray Scott, Olga Kurylenko, Robert Knepper, Ulrich Thomsen, Henry Ian Cusick, Michael Offei, Christian Erickson, Eriq Ebouaney, Joe Sheridan, James Faulkner, Jean-Marc Bellu, Nicky Naude, Abdou Sagna, Ilya Nikitenko, Loïc Molla
Genre: Action, ThrillerBuy from Amazon
Rating:  5 (from 1 vote)
Review: Interpol agent Mike Whittier (Dougray Scott) gets home only to find someone has arrived there before him: Agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant). Asked whether he's going to kill him, Agent 47 replies that he would have bumped him off long before now if that were his intention, and settles down to tell him what has brought him there. Agent 47 is part of a network of hitmen, raised in special orphanages to learn assassination techniques from an early age and distinguished by their shaven heads and bar codes tattooed on the back of their skulls. But one hit in Russia lands him as the target for a change...

Yet again the movie world turned to the computer game world in a search or inspiration, and yet again hardly anyone was interested in seeing the results, quite reasonably preferring to play the game instead, where they could control the action. The man controlling the action here was director Xavier Gens, working from a Skip Woods script, and if nothing else he worked up an atmosphere of danger which might not have painted a pretty picture of modern Russia, but did make its corruption look the perfect backdrop for an action thriller.

The hit Agent 47 is supposed to carry out is on Russian President Belicoff (Ulrich Thomsen), a man with shady links to the country's criminal underground: his brother (Henry Ian Cusick from Lost) is an out and out villain and gangster. Actual Russian politicians may well be insulted by this depiction, but its par for the course in such things, and the plot is more concerned with a cat and mouse chase between the anti-hero hitman and his pursuer, Whittier.

If someone else doesn't get to Agent 47 first, that is. His assassination of Belicoff appears to go as well as can be expected, but then the news reaches him that the President was only grazed by the bullet. How could this be? He must be dead, thinks the agent, or he does until he sees the President at a news conference with a bandage on his bonce but otherwise right as rain. The explanation for how he survived is a preposterous one, but you don't watch action movies produced by Luc Besson for their realism, and there's more of that to come.

The love interest, if you can call her that, is supplied by Olga Kurylneko as Nika Boronina, Belicoff's prostitute/mistress although Agent 47 never lays a hand on her, being an austere type of chap who is dedicated to his dubious cause. She actually brightens up the film quite a bit, for it's a murky experience for the most part, and Kurylenko was obviously headed for bigger things (like a James Bond movie) with the talent to match them here. From then on there are shoot 'em up sequences galore, which do grow numbing as the film draws on because Olyphant never figures out a way to make his character appealing. He'd be more at home in a Spaghetti Western on this evidence, as much of the film is leaden in execution (no pun intended). Music by Geoff Zanelli.

[Fox's Region 2 DVD has a plethora of featurettes, a gag reel that's a lot funnier than the feature, and deleted scenes as extras.]
Reviewer: Graeme Clark

 

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