Hitman, based on the infamous video game series, is yet another reason why video games need to just stay at home. This film would definitely work fine as a game but we simply can’t play it. We can only sit in our seats and stare. There isn’t a part where the talking stops and the action begins, allowing us to control the Hitman and shoot whoever gets in his way. This lack of gameplay option gives the viewer that constant feeling that he or she is watching someone else play a game without ever being given a chance to play on their own.

If this film is an accurate enough adaptation of any entry in this game franchise, it wouldn’t have been successful enough to warrant a film adaptation. But since it was that engrossing, who would have ever thought it’d be the cinematic equivalent to wooden planks reenacting The Bourne Identity, which in it of itself is a film this one desperately tries to imitate (even down to the similar sounding score).

After Agent 47 (Timothy Olyphant) executes a contract and kills a top Russian official of some sort, he quickly learns that either the company who trained him or the outfit who hired him for the job has betrayed him.

What follows is a lot of predictable twists, switcharoos, and painfully construed dialogue. Olyphant’s performance (as well as everyone else) is as stiff as the polygons that make up the digital character it’s based on. Every little detail is illogically spelled out for you as if you are in the gaming world. The writers just couldn’t separate the binary world apart from the filmic one.

Fans of the source material will no doubt marvel at the amount of action sequences presented here. Everyone else will laugh at its mediocrity. It’s as embarrassing as anything Steven Seagal has put out in the past decade.

Director Xavier Gans constructed a film that was to be included in this year’s After Dark Horrorfest. The movie was Frontier(s) and it was pulled from the lineup after the MPAA slapped it with an NC-17. Pretty ironic for a so-called “festival” dedicated to horror films to pull a film deemed too graphic for traditional audience. Regardless, the film has been generating quite a positive buzz from real film festival audiences so one should assume he has skill behind the camera, right? Don’t get too excited. All he did here was give us the worst theatrically released film of the year so far.