HITMAN

This movie is getting three slices because it’s pretty, it delivers on its promise of action and it features LOST’s Henry Ian Cusick in a slimy cameo as an arms dealer. That’s about it.

Beyond that trio of pluses, Hitman -- yet another hollow movie based on a shoot-‘em’up video game – is a big, old minus that has very little to offer any non-gamer filmgoers. It’s wall-to-wall testosterone and far, far more style than actual substance...which, I suppose, is to be expected given the depth of its source material.

The normally animated and exciting Timothy Olyphant is somewhat miscast (and uninteresting) as the robotic, mechanical and emotionless trained assassin named Agent 47. In flashbacks that look more than a little ripped off from TV’s Dark Angel, we discover that 47 has been learning how to kill people since he was just a shorn-bald boy with a UPC code tattooed at the base of his skill. Now a grown-up who’s risen to be the top of his field and who’s working for a mysterious global organization known only as The Agency, 47’s been tapped to off the Russian president (Ulrich Thomsen, brilliant in Brothers and sort of slumming in a clichéd role here)...while simultaneously evading capture by an Interpol agent (Dougray Scott, looking very haggard) eager to bring down the world’s most wanted killer. Along the way, presumably to make 47 more “relatable,” the filmmakers make the colossal mistake of throwing a love interest into the mix – tarty, trashy, oversexed, hooker-like Nika (Olga Kurylenko), whose look and behavior seem to have been crafted for the sole purpose of titillating the video game’s rabid fanboys. (“OMG! Look! Boobies!”) It felt like she’d been dropped in from some lame Cold-War offering from, like, 1981.

Anyway, what follows is basically all action, all the time and, stylistically, it looks like a cool music video. Lots and lots of people die in assorted colorful ways, often with random innards being splattered across the screen for added effect. Story-wise, the movie is one note: kill or be killed. Performance-wise, it’s no better – Olyphant was perhaps the wrong actor for this role. He’s reined in...and looks it. Kurylenko’s character veers back and forth between petulant captive, amorous would-be girlfriend and cunning participant, to the point where it seems like she’s actually playing three different characters depending on how much (or how little) clothing she has on. And ALL of the supporting players are hugely cheesy, from the way over-the-top Russian agent (Prison Break’s Robert Knepper) on the case, to Scott’s unbelievably earnest turn that tries (and fails) to mimic Tommy Lee Jones’ marshal from The Fugitive -- i.e., “You’re my target and I want to hate you, but I also respect you and want to help you!”

But perhaps the film’s worst flaw is its looping. Almost every single frame of this movie had its dialogue rerecorded afterward and it is so poorly done that the whole thing looks like a very badly dubbed foreign film...except that everyone is speaking English. It was incredibly distracting and gave the entire film a weird, artificial (or, more artificial than it already seemed) vibe.

Then again, given everything else about this empty money-grab of a movie, perhaps that’s totally fitting.