I went into this movie in a way that was probably unfair for the movie. Much like The Martian, I was familiar with the canon around Hitman. I think I played all the games as they came out, and I even saw the previous Hitman movie. That previous movie, starring Timothy Olyphant, was actually written by the same guy who wrote this one. But this is a total reboot, and it's just as well, as the first movie was really not that good.
In the titular role of the hitman we get Rupert Friend, who I only remember from the TV show Homeland. The problem is, this is a really hard role to play. I know people like Statham make it look easy to be a sociopathic killer with a heart of gold, but not everyone can pull it off. For heaven sake, Timothy Olyphant is an excellent actor and he couldn't pull it off for the other film. Rupert tries hard, and he does an okay job. Although, not everyone's intended to ever have a shaved head.
Hannah Ware plays the damsel in distress for this movie. It's all kinda complicated who she really is, but she gets put in a position where she needs rescued, and Rupert is the guy who has to rescue her. He winds up rescuing her from the bad guy, Zachary Quinto, who happens to be yet another one of these genetically engineered super hitmen. So, the chase is on.
The problem with basing this movie on the videogame is that you create an expectation level of things that players do in the game all the time that are simply expected to be in the movie. I intellectually understand that some of the things don't translate from the videogame, so I have to make allowances for that. This movie didn't make enough callbacks to the videogame to justify the title, and it didn't move far enough away from the videogame to justify making it for any other reason.
This movie reminds me a lot of the reboot of Judge Dredd. They cast an actor I didn't think could probably carry the whole movie, it was a reboot of a franchise that had a higher profile actor in the lead role in the first place, and the diehard faithful just aren't going to like it. As a standalone movie, it's okay. It's not great, but it's all right. It's just a bunch of action strung together by a very thin plot, and the videogame is just a plot device.
If you need to blame someone for the mediocrity of this movie, that has to fall on Skip Woods, the guy who wrote this screenplay and the screenplay before this one. The previous attempt was a pretty bad story, and this one had no more depth. I have no idea why anyone would have picked him to write it again. At least the director, Aleksander Bach, had never directed a feature-length movie before, so he gets a pass. Again, this wasn't terrible, but it could have been so much more.
Acting was okay
Story was weak
Dialogue was weak
Direction was okay
Cinematography was very good
Bottom Line: A movie that should have been a stand-out is just run-of-the-mill.
2.5/5