Movie Review: Hitman Agent 47

I thought I'd be hard pressed to see a film worse than Fantastic Four this year.
In only one month, I have been proved wrong by Hitman Agent 47.

We're shoved full steam through a rushed overview of the film's setting by a narrator for the first few minutes. It's meant to set the scene, but does little towards making the film we're about to see make any sense. This film is not about an assassin, it is barely even about the titular 47 at all in fact. For the majority of the film we follow a young woman, Katia, who has spent her whole life searching for a mysterious man.
That really is all we're given to go on, as due to the truly awful plot, not much more makes sense. The man Katia seeks is her father, the creator of the secret project that created 47, but she doesn't know either of these details. So why or how she has spent her life searching for him is utterly a mystery, with no forthcoming explanation as the film goes on.
Pursued by the over-aggressive Agent 47, and teaming up with a strange man who calls himself John Smith, the woman continues her search across the globe. When they aren't being shot at by 47, we're treated to some truly excruciating dialogue scenes between Katia and John, that just feel incredibly awkward. Katia spends the whole film with tears in her eyes for no reason, making her performance seem melodramatic, and John Smith is just plain one of the worst characters put to the screen this year. His dialogue is dull, his personality is non-existant, and everything is delivered by an apparently stoned Zachary Quinto in his worst role to date.
47 pulls more face/heel turns than the Undertaker in the films first act, going from brooding, thoughtful hero to a bullet spraying maniac in minutes. Anyone who has played a Hitman game knows that it's about subtlety and subterfuge, the goal being for 47 to eliminate his targets with precision kills, and escaping entirely unseen. The 47 we see here has less subtlety than Anton Chigurh, pulling out his twin Berettas and blasting noisily away in every scene.
After 47 and Katia team up to find her father, the film settles into an uneven pace of extreme, almost comedic violence and long boring scenes of tiring dialogue. How a film can spend so much time talking and still make no sense is beyond me. So much of the film's plot runs entirely on hunches and pure guess work that it seems none of these highly specialized characters really know what they're doing. 

By the time the film rolls to a climax, we've switched protagonists a few times, and we've barely seen the character who is meant to be the arch villain, and really never even get an idea of who he's even meant to be before our heroes confront him.

There is so little enjoyable about this second adaptation of the popular video game series that it's really hard to know where to start. The protagonist, the titular 47, is soulless and devoid of personality, but not in the good way you expect from this character. His lines are wooden, and his wishy washy character simply doesn't make any sense. He's demanding his female ward to "Trust me!" in a desperate tone one scene, and then sadly sighing "Don't put your faith in me." the next. We see none of the thoughtful, intellectual character here, and he frankly comes off as awkward throughout the whole film. To make matters worse, the actor taking the mantle of 47, Rupert Friend, is simply not intimidating in the role. His voice carries no weight, and his stature is neither imposing, not threatening. The character of 47 is meant to be a human apex predator, a perfect, precise killing machine. What we have here is a James Bond sidekick at best.

Katia is an oddly soulless lead as well. A character who seems driven for no clear reason, with goals we never truly understand. She is said to have 'advanced survival abilities' which appear to manifest in the film as her literally seeing the future, and these abilities are continually used as a segway between scenes or get-out-of-awkward-situation free cards. Instead of it appearing like she's a character with advanced, inherent skills, it just seems supernatural, almost psychic in nature, and doesn't fit at all. There's even a baffling moment suggesting that Katia and 47 communicate telepathically that isn't remotely satisfactorily explained. The film can't quite decide if her story or 47's is the central one, so neither feel properly fleshed out, and her relationship to 47 is so thin and unconvincing, there's absolutely nothing to suggest she wouldn't switch alliances again at the drop of a hat.

This is a film that insists upon mood with nothing to back it up, providing a facade of drama without any substance behind it. 47 or John Smith will have action scenes of such little interest or impact, backed up with a soundtrack that desperately suggests to you that the scene is cool. The same is true of several painful scenes of drama, where a sudden violin overture will kick in to remind you to switch from excitement to sadness, because the dialogue sure as hell isn't going to get you there. You'll notice dialogue exchanges lifted straight from other films, in fact.

Hitman: Agent 47 boils down to an uninteresting and predictable climax, with little excitement along the way. The journey to the finale feels routine and genuinely uninspired, and the last scene is empty of any real feeling of satisfaction or resolution. There aren't loose ends, so to speak, just empty plot points. Why introduce 47's dispatcher at all if she never plays any significance on the plot whatsoever, and why does 47 disobey his orders without any reason? Why repeatedly show that Katia takes apart objects when she's bored, and never bring it back in the story? Unanswered questions that pull apart the integrity of the main characters make the whole thing feel like a half baked plan, a first draft that never saw another look.

It's hard to make a good video game movie, we know this from the long history of tepid adaptations, but Hitman: Agent 47 is a poor excuse for an attempt in almost every way.

Movie Review: Fantastic Four.

I have never been a big fan of the Fantastic Four.
In my opinion, they're the product of an older era of the superhero concept, one that has moved on in leaps and bounds in the sixty-odd years since the original Marvel team first appeared. They've tried to give a fresh spin to the familiar characters of Mr Fantastic, Johnny and Sue Storm, and The Thing so many times you would think they'd be unrecognizable, but nothing ever really seems to change with these guys.

The same seems to be true every time they cross to a new media. Sure, they had a popular cartoon in the 90's, but no one liked it as much as the X-Men cartoon, and the last two Fantastic Four film adaptations were coughed up among other, more successful comic movies and were swiftly forgotten. Did we really need another reboot of the team that just keeps getting left behind?

For the first hour of the brand new, imaginatively titled 'Fantastic Four', you could have fooled me that we did. We follow the misadventures of a young Reed Richards, a genius scientific prodigy building his teleportation device in his father's garage with the help of his friend Ben, and it's good cinema all the way. We watch their friendship grow as they work on Reed's device in his high school science fair, and then be tested as Reed is recruited by the project head of a secret government test site to finish ironing out the kinks in their grand design.

All this is good stuff. The character work is strong, the acting is enjoyable. The characters aren't a far stretch from what we know and expect. The project lead's two children, the frosty and detail oriented Sue Storm, and her cocky street racing brother Johnny, join Reed on his development of the teleportation device that will save mankind from itself. Also working on the project is the foreign wild-card Victor Von Doom, an outspoken youth with just as much genius as Reed, but dangerous personality quirks. At least, this is what we're told about Victor, from the point of view of the government suit who takes the role of the film's villain through 90% of the runtime.

The Victor we actually see isn't all that bad at all. He's just a confident, unforgiving young man who considers the ruling cliche of America unacceptable. Which isn't villainous at all, considering the proof we see of the nefarious intentions of these same government characters.

Together, the soon to become Fantastic foursome and Victor perfect the project, and in a twist of drunken college intent, decide to send themselves through the teleporter before some astronaut can take all the glory. Instead of it being the four we expect who get to travel to the alternate world, however,  they leave Sue Storm behind and drag along Ben Grimm, which seemed not particularly sensible, but friendship IS magic after all.

The excursion doesn't go as planned, and while Sue watches helplessly from her monitors back on Earth, Victor plunges his hand into a pool of living energy and sets off an earthquake that threatens to kill them all. Reed, Johnny and Grimm are thrown back through the teleporter (each with fitting and appropriate twists and malfunctions that decide their powers) and back to Earth to face the results of their mistake.

We see a glimpse of them afterwards, the four just beginning to show signs of their powers, before we are treated to the screen that, in my opinion, completely ruined the movie. A fade to black with the words: 1 year later.

Instead of following the characters we've seen for the whole film, and watch them experience their new powers, with all the joy and horror that would come with it, the film just skips it all entirely to take us to a future where they have already all mastered their abilities. We don't get to see Johnny Storm realize he can fly and throw fireballs, we don't get to see Sue learn to control her invisibility or develop her force fields, we don't get a single scene with poor old Ben Grimm realizing what he has become as he looks down at himself. All the character development up to this point is essentially wasted, and what should have been the most dramatic, intense part of the movie, is skipped completely.

From here, the film takes a roller coaster spiral downwards into the finale. No time is wasted on characters anymore, it's just government conspiracy and half-hearted arguments between the characters we don't really know anymore.

The finale rushes in like a truck, and after a second attempt to send travelers to the alternate world, Victor is back on the scene and becomes the movie's instant villain, with little to no real reason or drive. He's back, he wants to destroy everything, and the Fantastic Four must stop him.

The problem here is that we haven't seen these characters grow together, we haven't seen moments of reprieve from the training, or scenes of friendship or the characters just being themselves. From what we gather from the choppy sequences post time skip, they've barely even seen each other in a year. This doesn't feel like a team at all, as much as four characters who're just conveniently together in time to fight the bad guy. Which they do, and in under five minutes have defeated and saved the world.

The whole thing is over so fast and so effortlessly that Doom feels entirely like an afterthought instead of the great villain he's meant to be. The final battle is almost a joke, it's over so quick, not to mention they actually have a moment where Reed stretches out one of his arms to box Doom in the face, complete with comedy elastic noise, and expect us still to be taking the fight seriously.

It all started out so good, and it's such a shame that after the first act, the film just became a trial in the expected. There's no dynamic between our heroes, which is incredibly noticeable in the awkward scenes between Reed and Ben towards the end of the film, and there's not even any effort to develop the heavily hinted at love triangle with Reed/Sue/Doom that should have been so important. With its short run time, it seems to be missing its entire second act altogether.

The worst part is, for a superhero team that above all else and all others is about family, friendship and being close with one another, the Fantastic Four feels like less of a team than any other superhero movie I've ever seen. By the finale they seem to have no real connection, no genuine friendships, and the scene where they are meant to be taking friendly shots at each other just feels like they are being intentionally cruel to one another.

If the film could have continued with the fun and cleverness that it started with, there would be something here. What we have here instead, is a film that will be doing a very fine Invisible Woman impression at the box office.