A video game adaptation renaissance has emerged over the past decade, both in terms of film adaptations, with Five Nights at Freddy’s and the Sonic the Hedgehog films, and especially on television, with the acclaimed shows Knuckles, Fallout, and The Last of Us, all of which have been successful precisely because of their ability to transcend the video game format through a sharpened focus on character and story.

The current golden age of video game adaptations highlights just how disreputable the genre was in the 1990s and 2000s when they virtually all seemed doomed to failure. This contrast is perhaps most clearly highlighted by Hitman, the 2007 feature film adaptation of the popular video game series of the same name. Hitman stars Timothy Olyphant as the franchise’s eponymous character, Agent 47, a genetically engineered assassin with a bar code tattooed on the back of his shaved head.

While Hitman, which grossed just over $100 million at the worldwide box office, was a box-office success at the time of its release, relative to its modest production cost, the film received scathing reviews, as seen with the film’s dismal 16% Rotten Tomatoes score. Despite the fact that Hitman was profitable, this negative reception led to the cancelation of a sequel.

However, the film has found redemption on Netflix, where it has become one of the streaming platform’s most viewed films. This newfound appreciation of Hitman is long overdue, as while it certainly isn’t a masterpiece, it’s better than most of its counterparts from the 2000s, as well as the awful 2015 reboot, Hitman: Agent 47, which has also become a Netflix hit, despite holding a Rotten Tomatoes score of just 8%.

Hitman Is a Character Study Disguised as a Video Game Adaptation
Release Date November 21, 2007 Runtime 89

Like most quality video game adaptations, Hitman is at its best when it foregoes attempting to bring the video game experience to life and instead focuses on developing its central character, in this case, Agent 47, who is introduced in the film as a boy who was trained to be a globetrotting professional assassin by a shadowy group known simply as the Organization.

In the film, the adult Agent 47, played by Timothy Olyphant, is told by his mysterious handler, Diana, to undertake the monumental assignment of killing the Russian president. However, after seemingly completing this assignment, a mystified Agent 47 is told that the intended target, Belicoff, inexplicably survived the assassination attempt. After being ordered to eliminate a potential witness to the assassination attempt, Agent 47 discovers that the Organization intends to erase him instead.

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Like the great 1967 crime thriller Le Samourai, in which a professional assassin, played by Alain Delon, tries to discover who’s trying to kill him while eluding the police, Hitman is most exciting when the film shows how Agent 47’s skills as an assassin conflict with his lack of human development. This is established in the movie through Agent 47’s relationship with the witness, a Russian prostitute named Nika, whom Agent 47 struggles to communicate with, ostensibly because Agent 47 is a virgin whose only previous contact with women has been in his capacity as a contract killer.

In contrast to the Hitman video games, which are merely content to place Agent 47 in various exotic locations where he must kill and think his way out of deadly situations, Hitman, like Le Samourai, is just as interested in the psychology of the emotionally detached Agent 47 as his murderous exploits. When Nika, played by Olga Kurylenko, enters Agent 47’s life, Agent 47 is unable to resist Nika, the elusive Russian president’s mistress, because Agent 47, recalling his lost childhood, sees in her a helpless, lonely, needy woman who is as much a victim as he is.

Timothy Olyphant Is an Excellent Agent 47

Before Timothy Olyphant was cast as Agent 47, Vin Diesel was set to produce and star in Hitman, which would obviously have had a much larger budget with Diesel’s attachment, as opposed to Olyphant’s Hitman, which had a production cost of under $25 million. After Diesel left the project, Jason Statham, whose intensity and sleekness, along with Statham’s bald appearance, made him an ideal choice, also turned down the role, which he felt was too similar to his Frank Martin character from The Transporter film series. Many audiences and critics have described Statham’s 2016 thriller Mechanic: Resurrection as being the best live-action Hitman adaptation made so far.

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However, while Olyphant was unable to match Diesel and Statham’s strong attachment to the action genre, Olyphant’s gravelly voice and steely intensity made the talented and versatile Olyphant an interesting and sound choice to play the stealthy Agent 47, which is a role that benefits from the same icy intelligence and precision that he brought to his villainous performance in the 2007 action thriller film Live Free or Die Hard.

The Hitman Franchise Should Return to the Big Screen

Despite the renewed popularity of Hitman and Hitman: Agent 47, along with the continued success of the video-game series, there have been very few updates regarding future adaptations since 2017, when it was announced that John Wick creator Derek Kolstad was the writer of a prospective Hitman television series for Hulu. The last update came in 2021, when Kolstad revealed details about the proposed Agent 47 television character, including the idea that the historically bald Agent 47 will have hair.

Whether another adaptation becomes a reality, the original Hitman film, which has routinely been listed among the worst video game adaptations in history, has been unfairly maligned and overlooked since its 2007 release and is worthy of rediscovery. The current popularity of the franchise is a testament to the power of timing, as while the film was initially released at a time when audiences and critics were predisposed to hating video game adaptations, Hitman has finally been embraced in an era in which video game adaptations can, with some exceptions, seemingly do no wrong. Hitman is streaming on Tubi.