‘Hitman’: rips off ‘Bourne’

It would have been better to leave this in the video-game realm.

By ROGER MOORE

ORLANDO SENTINEL

“Hitman,” the thriller based on the mass-murdering-assassin video game, is a “Bourne” knock-off, and not a very good one at that. It has the killer without an identity, lots of other killers out to kill him, all set to a score that “Bourne” composer John Powell should consider suing for violating his movie music copyright.

Timothy Olyphant is the bald Bourne, a skinhead in a “Men in Black” suit with a bar-code tattooed on the back of his skull in plain sight. Somehow, all of Interpol can’t find this killer despite the fact that he stands out in any crowd.

He was, the opening credits show us, raised by monks to murder, a literal man without a name. He is called, we learn, “47.”

Our killer does in some nasty Nigerians in the opening moments. But it’s when he takes a shot at the ruthless Russian president that Interpol, in the person of an agent played by Dougray Scott, closes in.

The Russians, shockingly, want jurisdiction over this guy who just tried to assassinate their leader. Much bickering in Russian-accented English ensues.

There’s an under-explained, under-developed conspiracy by something called “The Organization” that wants to keep our chatty killer quiet. And 47’s own “Agency” sends dudes armed with pistols and samurai swords to get him as well.

Skip Woods, who wrote the script to “Swordfish,” earns a writing credit here. It’s one he might be a little reluctant to take, what with clichéd public-restroom shoot-outs and lines such as “You have no idea who you’re dealing with” coming from Mr. Interpol, cut-and-pasted from 134 other movies and slapped into this.

Olyphant, sort of a younger Bill Paxton, made a lousy villain in last summer’s “Live Free or Die Hard.” Even with his head shaved and his silver guns with silver silencers always at the ready, he seems miscast as an amoral automaton of a killer.

It’s a character better left in the soulless void of video gaming, where we don’t have to fret over the psyche of somebody raised, from childhood, to murder, and how they might fit in with civilized society.

Olyphant seems to want to emote something more into this guy. He can’t.

Still, the studio spent some money on “Hitman,” at least for the second-unit stuff.