Movie review: 'Hitman'

Timothy Olyphant in "Hitman" (Credit: 20th Century Fox)

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2 stars (out of four)

Here’s all you really need to know before the opening credits roll in “Hitman”: There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed.
And that’s a good thing, considering there isn’t much dialogue to carry the film.

Agent 47 is an assassin-for-hire with a flawless record that makes him in demand and wealthy. He’s also quiet; Agent 47 (or Mr. 47 or simply 47, as video gamers know him) doesn’t speak unless it’s necessary. But this is a film that’s all about the action, and there’s plenty of it here. “Deadwood’s” Timothy Olyphant, shaved bald (the better to read the bar-code tattoo on the back of his head), plays the trained killer who recently has discovered that his own name is next on someone else’s hit list.

In flashbacks, we’re to understand that he was reared in some sort of religious sect that breeds and brands its charges from an early age to serve as highly intelligent killing machines. Fear not, gamers, he brings his cool weaponry from his previous medium, and the film has really bloody action scenes with high body counts. You don’t exactly have to know every nook and cranny of the game that inspired it to get “Hitman,” nor do you need to know who’s who to ride it out. (It might be helpful to remember that the game’s inspirations include the assassination genre that includes “La Femme Nikita.”)

 It’s fairly easy to decipher which bad guy is the baddest, and by design it’s pretty easy to get behind Olyphant’s mysterious assassin. In the center of a political cat and mouse game, hunted by Interpol and the Russian military, his life is complicated by his protective feelings for a Russian prostitute (Olga Kurylenko), who is a witness and also a target.

Slowly, but not quite completely, Agent 47’s cool wavers and we get a glimpse of some uncharacteristic, non-enigmatic concern there. And that’s enough for us to root him down the home stretch.

klcarter@tribune.com

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