Movie Review: Hitman Agent 47 (2015)

Hello all,

This review and the American Ultra review will serve as a comparison between two types of comedies: the intentionally hilarious, and the unintentionally hilarious. For this review, I will be talking about the latter, as Hitman Agent 47 (also a great nominee for most awkward title of the year) was fucking hysterical for all the wrong reasons. I can’t think of anything more to write in this part so let’s just get straight to it shall we.

Plot Summary - Honestly, I can’t figure out a way to tell the plot without it sounding really stupid, so let’s the easiest way to say it, Zachary Quinto and the guy playing 47 are looking for a girl and want to use her to find her father who made 47 so they can make more of him.

Pros - It had a couple of great shots and the action scenes we’re pretty solid for the most part.

Cons - I honestly don’t know where to start, so to avoid one long block of text we’ll make a list and I’ll just write them down as they come to mind, oh and spoiler alert.

• Zachary Quinto in this movie, is basically a terminator with a self esteem issue. They give this description of how he survives getting shot point blank four times and they basically just rewrote Kyle Reese’s description of the terminator from the first terminator movie. As for the self esteem issue, he has this pretty solid fight scene against the agent and basically sets himself up as a badass, only for him when he thinks he has the agent cornered to suddenly ask him to say that he’s (Quinto) better than him. What the hell dude you’re already a badass basic terminator and all of a sudden you need a self esteem boost? Why?
• 47, for the same amount of time Quinto’s a badass, is this stern deep voiced no nonsense killer, then once he has the girl and is basically training her to be like him, out of fucking nowhere is voice changes and he starts making jokes without any setup whatsoever. The first time he makes one is so sudden I actually had to do a double take on it.
• Katya, for longer than the other two is a pretty interesting character, she’s trying to find a man who she knows nothing about while dealing with the same heightened sense that 47 has without the benefit of knowing it. How 47 trains her though also starts out interestingly, but then it just gets bewildering. He sort of just drops these lessons on her out of nowhere, one of them being how to avoid being seen by cameras at the airport. So there is a scene in this movie where we watch her walk around an airport. not hiding behind pillars or running from someone, just walking around trying not to be seen by the cameras. Thrilling scenes of her walking, sitting on a cart, and following groups of people, only for them to reveal at the end of the scene that she got spotted by the camera at the door making the whole previous scene moot. Speaking of pointless scenes….
• The main plot of the movie is that they are looking for Katya’s father, so when they go to the city that she’s in, the stay the first night in a hotel room. When 47 goes to sleep, Katya goes swimming (in the longest fucking private suite pool I have ever fucking seen) then she gets out and looks at 47’s guns, cut to the next morning, she’s taken them apart, and then three guys storm in the room and 47 has to kill them by hand, after which she explains that when she gets nervous and can’t sleep she takes thing apart, which once again had not been previously established, except for maybe a blink and you’ll miss it shot from earlier in the movie. I say maybe because I have no fucking idea if it was there. So basically it’s an out of nowhere reason to have an out of nowhere fight (because they were freelance guys who somehow found them in one night) because they needed to pad a ninety minute long movie.
• The meeting with Katya’s father is, judging by how long it felt, was ten minutes and with all of the cliched dialogue you can think goes from why did you leave me to now the three of us are a family. Yes, three of us, including 47. Then when where they are gets attacked, he gets shot, and when 47 says to leave him behind, she, having only just met him, doesn’t want to leave him. It’s more cliched nonsense.
• Most PG-13 of 14A movies depending on your rating system usually have one or two swears in them that give them that rating. In this film when Quinto is torturing Katya’s father he forcefully adds the word fuck into two sentences because yeah this is a 14A film we can say fuck a couple of times look at how cool we are.
• But by far, and this was the scene that I finally realized that this was going to be hilarious, was when…..actually this needs a full explanation. In the beginning of the film, when we first meet Katya, she’s looking for a man who she doesn’t even know anything about, including that the man is her father, she’s just looking for someone. After she runs into Quinto, he tells her enough info about him, including that he’s her father, so that she figures out where he is. But after she’s captured by the agent, who she has been lead to believe will kill her without remorse, reveals to her that, this entire fucking time, she actually remembers everything about her childhood, including her father, what he did and even seeing 47, was in her head the entire time. She knew nothing about her past, spent most of her life looking for that information and she already knew it the entire fucking time. There’s an argument to be made that maybe him saying it provoked her, but the way it’s shot makes it look like he somehow transmitted the thoughts into her head himself and it’s just so bizarre looking.
• As for the rest of it, the dialogue is hokey, the character development is lacking and what little there is is forced, it has a sequel bait ending at the end which is never going to happen I’m sorry, they also have Agent 46 show up at the end but only for a weak twist and we don’t even get to see him do anything.

Final Score - 1/10

If this had been marketed as a satire of bad video game films, this would’ve been a solid 10. As it stands, since this whole blatant mess is played completely straight (which makes it even funnier) it has to get a one. The two good points are just massively overshadowed by the sheer ineptitude of what this film was trying to go for and massively missed. If you need a good laugh, this is the film for you, if you go into this expecting a serious hardcore reimagining of a movie adaptation, you’ll get a generic 90 minute mess.

I have tomorrow off, I’m seeing American Ultra, I’m super excited, and I’ll be posting the review tomorrow.

Until then, I’ll see you folks at the movies.