There's one last big action film coming this summer, and I hope it is non-stop absurdity and mayhem, because that's what the trailers for “Agent 47” have been promising for the entire campaign so far, including the just-released final red band trailer.
Game movies are still hard to get right, and I've been thinking a lot about the difference between the forms lately. Games are all about giving you agency and making you feel like you're the character, controlling that character's fate or world in some way. Movies are passive, something you sit and watch, with other people having already made all those choices for you. Finding some middle ground between those experiences would seem to be the best way to translate the experience of a game to the bigscreen, and it looks to me like they've gone out of their way to preserve the sort of holy shit destruction and mayhem that game fans love when they're in the middle of some giant mission.
In the absence of any big recognizable movie stars (no, Zachary Quinto does not count, since he has yet to really register outside of “Star Trek” on the big screen), “Hitman: Agent 47” has to sell the experience, and I sort of dig the way Agent 47 (Rupert Friend) looks vaguely like a number of other people, with a anonymous vanish-into-the-background sort of face. That makes him feel like the right choice to play this anonymous killer, part of a program that creates perfect killing machines. It looks like there are at least two other graduates from the program in the film, which should lead to some big crazy action.
If nothing else, I give them a salute for the tagline. There are certain taglines that feel like they are the inevitable conclusion of a line of thinking, and “You won't know what hit you” is a great one for a movie called “Hitman.” Simple, fun, and it sells the tone they're going for.
Will it work? We'll find out when “Hitman: Agent 47” arrives in theaters August 21, 2015.