Hitman (2007)

The 2007 adaptation of Hitman arrives with a bar code on its scalp and very little on its mind, which is the correct posture for a film about a genetically engineered assassin. Timothy Olyphant plays Agent 47 as a man sanded down to a function, and the movie follows suit. There is a Russian president, a body double, a mistress named Nika who exists to be escorted and imperiled, and an Interpol agent who spends the runtime being outmaneuvered. The plot is a knot the filmmakers decline to untie. Critics at the time were unkind. Slavoj Zizek, puzzlingly, was not.

On the matter of social consciousness, the film is nearly a blank slate. The cast is racially mixed, with Black performers in supporting roles as Interpol colleagues and a Nigerien warlord, and the film treats this as ordinary staffing. No theme attaches. Race goes unexamined, gender goes unexamined, and the female lead is defined almost entirely by her attachment to powerful men. There is no environmental sermon, no critique of wealth as a system, no meditation on neurodivergence despite a protagonist engineered instead of born. The script has no interest in lecturing us, and for that small mercy we can be grateful.

What remains is a competent, joyless thriller that treats violence as furniture and dialogue as connective tissue. It exists because a video game sold well, and it carries that origin without apology or shame. The gunrunning, the human trafficking, the clandestine Organization: all of it is texture, none of it is argument. Roger Ebert found something at the threshold between games and art, which is a generous reading of a film that mostly just wants to get to the next silenced pistol. We are left to classify it, as is our duty, and the classification is swift. A hitman, it turns out, can be many things. A vessel for progressive messaging is not among them. The sommelier swirls the glass, sets it down, and reaches for the next bottle without comment.

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