大象传媒

Hitman continues the grand Hollywood tradition of completely failing to turn a computer game into a decent movie. Timothy Olyphant is the nameless title character, a freelance assassin trained from birth at a mysterious assassin's polytechnic. Unfortunately for Agent 47, he's been set up by his own organisation and marked for death, so all the other hitman from his graduating class are planning a fatal high school reunion. Meanwhile, Dougray Scott's interpol agent watches from the sidelines in baffled admiration.

The central premise of Hitman, a stealth-based computer game, is far too flimsy to withstand the unflinching gaze of the movie camera. Let's take a single, glaring example: Olyphant's nameless killer, like everybody else from Hitman High, is bald and has a large, prominent bar code tattooed onto the back of his skull. This makes him remarkably easy to spot in a crowd, a disadvantage which the film blithely illustrates on numerous occasions. Of all the skills your kick-ass professional murderer would want on his or her CV, one imagines that "instant recognisability" wouldn't rate very highly.

"BUCKETS OF GLOBBY ARTERIAL BLOOD"

For some reason, 47 finds his protective instincts stirred by an abused prostitute (Olga Kurylenko). He expresses these newfound emotions by locking her in the boot of his car and drugging her when she decides - bizarrely - to seduce him. Back in London (London England, as the subtitle helpfully reminds us) Dougray Scott smokes moodily and argues with the Russian secret service, who refuse to believe that 47 really exists. One can't blame them really. Director Xavier Gens pads out this anorexic narrative with soulless but reasonably choreographed gun battles, and buckets of globby arterial blood.

Hitman is out in the UK on 30th November 2007.