In the first ten minutes we get some good action with cars, plus a terribly made fight scene where the visibility is poor (half dark half light) and there’s constant flashing lights, camera angle switching and white noise music – enough to give a normal person heightened levels of stress – stay clear of this movie if you’re epileptic.
After 10 minutes, the camera work continues to be poor, zooming in constantly on normal conversations, to the point we can’t get an objective feel of the interaction. This is very restrictive mood setting and it’s in conflict with the kind of comfortable vibe that a good action hero movie should seek to create.
Add to this, Rupert Friend having less character than Timothy Olyphant, this movie is significantly poorer than the original Hitman movie of 2007. Still, it’s got a decent amount of action, a fair cast and a fair budget – it’s clearly better than a B movie, and it’s kind of hitting the right genre, so I think we can rate this movie as just OK. Better than barely watchable, so not the lowest rating out of all the movies we’ve featured on this site – just one level better.
While in the original movie, Timothy Olyphant played a cool calm killer whose cheeky charisma started shining through, making it an interesting recipe. In this movie now, Rupert Friend has a totally flat personality – there’s nothing shining through except a weird mix of anxiety and meek personality. No wonder his fight scenes are all over the place with switching camera angles – he probably can’t throw a decent punch or kick to save his life.
The lead female is played by Hannah Ware – her character has extra-sensory perceptions, and is the estranged daughter of the original chief scientist behind this cult of assassins. Unfortunately, her acting isn’t much better than Rupert Friend’s – they’re both made for drama, not action hero movies, and most definitely not lead roles in action hero movies. She has the constant demeanour of an abuse victim, and she lacks the ability to adjust her mood according to the requirements of the scene. She clearly only got this role because of who her parents are and what cult she’s been raised in, in real life.
Zachary Quinto plays the chief antagonist in this movie, and unfortunately, he is also kind of made for drama. He has the constant demeanour of a kid in a candy shop. Being skinny isn’t enough to be a good action movie star, you really need good physical coordination and a collected look in your eyes too.
The director, or whichever producer was really calling the shots, should have probably been sacked along with pretty much all the cast members, then we could have probably picked a load of random guys from the stunt team to replace them all and made an equal or better movie with the same script & budget. It seems like, the actors here are all behind-the-scenes crew members who decided to have a party and pretend to be action heroes themselves. While this probably isn’t true, it’s not a million miles off, since Quinto is also producer, while Friend & Ware are best known for their parts in political dramas, and the other roles are all played by people with similar producer & dramatist vibes.
On the plus side, the plot gets a lot more interesting as it nears the half hour mark, and we get some interesting scenes, before more boring drama. This movie pretty much alternates between decent and mediocre scenes throughout.