Why Did I Watch That? - Hitman: Agent 47
I watched a bad movie today. It is sort of a guilty pleasure of mine. Watching bad movies that is. I revel in the terrible plots, paper-thin characters, cheesy effects, and wooden acting. It fuels me. I love them in a way that I can’t quite describe, or feel about bad games or music. To me, bad films deserve to be recognized, talked about, and maybe occasionally ridiculed. This one is no exception.
---
It always baffles me at which movies manage to get reboots made, and the absolute insistence on taking awful properties and milking them for all of their worth is more than a little ridiculous. There are a lot of great action movies, but there are also a lot of terrible action reboots. And for some reason, I just can't stop watching them (partly because of my almost obsession with bad movies, and partly because I'm a glutton for punishment).
Luckily Hitman is better than Death Race, but that is like trying to find out which of two spoons is sharper. I went into this with a vague hope that they would be able to leverage the property to make an at least passable movie, but instead of making the sneaky assassination movie that the game sets up so well, they try to turn it once again into an action packing political thriller full of super humans and gratuitous slow motion. It didn't work in 2007 and, unsurprisingly, it doesn't work here either.
Why Did I Watch That? - Hitman (2007)
There aren’t very many good video game movies. For some reason, it would appear that in the translation from games to film, something vital is lost. Condensing down the story and characterization of an entire franchise into a sub-two hour long movie is not an easy thing to do, and capturing the feel of gameplay, the driving force behind many games, in a human actor bound by the actual laws of physics is more than a little difficult.
As a franchise, Hitman has never had the most compelling story, propped up almost entirely by the puzzle-like challenge of finding your way through each mission without breaking stealth, navigating the semi-open levels and seeing which parts interacted with each other in interesting ways.