Timothy Olyphant – Action Hero Movies

This movie starts out at a decent pace, and reaches its peak shortly after half an hour in, as the young man who begains to gain his superpowers has a little play with his powers for the first time and feels quite invincible.

Alex Pettyfer takes the lead role here, as a young man coming into his superpowers as he goes through college trying to keep a low profile but also trying to live free. He does alright.

The legend that is Timothy Olyphant (star of Hitman) plays the lead character’s protector, posing as his father. It’s a bit of a drama style role — quite different to his role in Hitman — but he does quite well here still, showing he’s quite a well rounded actor really.

Dianna Agron blesses this movie as the lead female — she looks good and brightens up the movie quite well even if her actual acting skill is mediocre.

Kevin Durand (who plays the friendly beast called Joshua in Dark Angel alongside Jessica Alba) plays the main baddie in this movie — the Mogadorian Commander who’s hunting down the lead character. He’s alright in this role, but doesn’t wow.

After half an hour in, the movie descends into a bit of a slow drama fest, and it’s not until the second hour that the hero actually meets his enemies. Then the end battle is a bit inefficiently longwinded — it should have been condensed and made richer with cool features. If it continued to accellerate after half an hour in, and didn’t wear thin, it would have surely deserved a higher rating, but as it stands, I’m going to rate this movie Bang Average.

As the movie begins with kids being trained to be assassins from some kind of lab setting, while having barcodes tattooed into the backs of their necks, it’s clear the backstory to Hitman bears a striking resemblance to the TV series Dark Angel starring Jessica Alba.

Timothy Olyphant does a good job as the star of this simplified James Bond style movie – he has vibes of Michael Weatherly going on – they’re practically twins. Olyphant plays a highly skilled assassin called Agent 47 who has successfully evaded capture by police for a long time.

Olga Kurylenko does pretty well as the lead female in this movie. This was her breakthrough movie, before going on to take starring and supporting roles in many more exciting action movies, such as The Assassin Next Door (2009), Erased (2012), Oblivion (2013, with Tom Cruise), The November Man (2014, with Pierce Brosnan), Momentum (2015), Gun Shy (2017, with Antonio Banderas), Johnny English Strikes Again (2018, with Rowan Atkinson), The Courier (2019), High Heat (2022), Extraction 2 (2023, with Chris Hemsworth). Trying not to mention Quantum of Solace, as I can’t stand Daniel Craig trying to be James Bond – nevertheless Olga Kurylenko was in Quantum of Solace (2008) just one year after Hitman.

Timothy Olyphant, on the other hand, kind of disappeared, starring in no other major action movies after The Hitman, although he did take a minor supporting role in the Star Wars spin-off series The Mandalorian.

Robert Knepper (from Transporter 3) puts in a strong performance as the chief FSB (Russian secret police) agent in the movie. Dougray Scott also gives a strong performance as the Interpol agent who’s been tracking the assassin, Agent 47, around the world for a long time. That’s all the major cast members worth mentioning.

Overall, Hitman (2007) is a bit simplistic compared to a good James Bond movie, but it zeroes in on a certain style very similar to The Transporter or The Equalizer, and does it equally well. With a slightly stronger plot, and a slightly slicker and less suspenseful back end, it could be even better, although they all suffer from this same issue.